Restaurant Calorie Posting Mandates, Obesity, and Consumer Welfare

This paper examines the impacts of laws requiring chain restaurants to post calorie information on menus on both body mass index (BMI) and consumer well-being. By providing information in a setting where imperfect information has been observed, one might expect these mandates to reduce BMI and improve welfare. On the other hand, a model incorporating moral costs for violating social norms - such as those applied in the charitable giving literature - suggests that utility could drop even if BMI falls. Seeing high calorie counts may impose a shadow tax of guilt, making it optimal to choose a healthier option conditional on seeing the information, but leaving consumers worse off than if they had never been exposed to the information. Using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and an empirical model exploiting variation in county and state calorie posting laws, we find evidence that these laws reduce BMI but also life satisfaction. The results are robust to numerous specification changes and pass placebo tests with pre-treatment data. Testing for heterogeneity reveals that the groups with the largest weight losses are also in most cases those with the largest drops in life satisfaction. Moreover, life satisfaction only drops among those who are not overweight or obese, a group that may be more motivated to change behavior by the moral cost than any potential health improvement.