Sugar-sweetened beverage taxes have become an increasingly popular policy to combat the worldwide obesity epidemic, but relatively little is known about their impact on health outcomes, particularly among high school aged students. In this paper, the author uses public-use data from the Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System to determine whether high school students living in three of the American cities which had implemented Sugar-sweetened beverage taxes had experienced public health improvements. Using an event-study design that compares outcomes in treated districts to a group of similar control districts, the study finds reductions in soda consumption in Philadelphia and average body mass index in Philadelphia, San Francisco and Oakland, with suggestive evidence that the improvements are concentrated among female and non-white respondents in both cases.
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