Interesting follow up paper:
Kearney and Levine forthcoming AEJ:Applied The Revenge of the Cookie Monster, Weight Gain and Childhood Exposure to Sesame Street.
In Kearney and Levine (2019) we demonstrated that children exposed to Sesame Street experienced improved educational and labor market outcomes. However, here we show that Sesame Street is not without its negative consequences. We again use variation in distance to UHF versus VHF transmissions and uncover substantial impacts on BMI. We uncover that children who were exposed to Sesame Street saw a large increase in BMI. Our results suggest that Sesame Street exposure accounts for approximately 32 percent of the increase in youth obesity between the 1960s and 1980s. We also reveal a 22 percent increase in county level cookie sales during the week after an episode when the Cookie Monster was in at least two scenes and that cookies purchased increased monotonically with the number of minutes the Cookie Monster was in the episode. While we had previously found the positive educational impact largely for boys, here, we find the increase in weight occurred for both boys and girls.