Fast-Food Consumption and the Ban on Advertising Targeting Children: The Quebec Experience

With growing concern about childhood obesity and associated health risks, several countries are considering banning food advertising directed to children. In 1980, Quebec imposed a ban on advertising to children under the age of 13. The authors look at whether the advertising ban affected consumer food choice in Quebec. Using data from the Canadian household expenditure survey and Canada Foodex survey from 1984 to 1992, they ask whether expenditure on fast food is lower in those groups affected by the ban compared to those who are not. They control for mother tongue as native English speakers have access to more sources of media from outside Quebec than those families who speak French or other languages. The authors use a difference-in-difference methodology across several dimensions, holding family characteristics such as income, education and immigrant status constant. First, they test whether expenditure on fast food by French-speaking families with kids in Quebec differs more markedly than expenditure by English-speaking families in Quebec compared to their English and French-speaking counterparts in Ontario. They also compare consumption of those families whose first language is neither French nor English to Anglophones in the two provinces. Further, given the ban is directed to children, they estimate the effect of the ban by testing the difference in expenditure between households with children and those without in Quebec versus Ontario. Their second approach is to estimate the effect of the ban by matching households with similar characteristics across Ontario and Quebec. Using both methodologies, they find that for fast food, the primary effect of the ban is to reduce the probability of purchasing fast food as opposed to affecting the amount spent when the family was already in the restaurant. The authors conclude that the Quebec ban had an effect on the number of fast food meals purchased.

Journal of Marketing Research

Vol. 48

no. 5

799-813

October 2011

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