Neighborhoods are an important social determinant of health. Neighborhood crime, in particular, has been associated with worse chronic health outcomes among adults and children including worse self-reported and cardiovascular health, decreased mental health, increased difficulty sleeping, and increased child asthma (Bencsik, 2018; Browning et al., 2012; Doyle et al., 2006; Dustmann and Fasani, 2016; Hessel et al., 2019; Hill et al., 2016; Merrill et al., 2021). Further, neighborhood crime also negatively affects birth outcomes (Currie et al., 2022; Goin et al., 2019; Grossman and Khalil, 2022) and the well-being of adults (Cornaglia et al., 2014). Exposure to community violence is a reality for many children in the nation’s urban centers. According to the FBI, in 2020, cities across the country have experienced an increase in violence.1 In 2020, New York City (NYC) – the focus of the present study – experienced its largest year-over-year increase in homicides since the 1970s (Mangual, 2021). Even before this recent rise in violent crime, some children had been living in areas with recurring violence. In 2016, over 77,000 public school students lived within a very short distance of more than ten violent crimes (homicides, aggravated assaults, and robberies).

Existing research provides strong evidence that violence negatively affects students’ academic outcomes (Bowen and Bowen, 1999; Schwartz 2022; Sharkey, 2010), socioemotional development (McCoy et al., 2016; Ramey and Harrington, 2019), and stress (Theall et al., 2017). Exposure to neighborhood crime may also affect child health, including body mass index (BMI) and the probability of obesity and overweight. Indeed, prior research shows that a child’s environment plays an important role in shaping their weight and fitness (Bader et al., 2013; Carroll-Scott et al., 2013; Morgan Hughey et al., 2017) and violent crime may moderate that relationship. Specifically, neighborhood crime may hinder the enjoyment of neighborhood amenities such as parks or playgrounds, limit the amount or frequency of time spent outside being active, and increase stress with detrimental consequences for child health and weight (Sandy et al., 2013).

Identifying whether neighborhood violent crime is linked with increased BMI or a higher risk of obesity and overweight among children and adolescents is important. According to the CDC, in 2017 and 2018, the prevalence of childhood obesity was 19.3 percent, and the prevalence was higher among adolescents aged 12 to 19 years old (21.2 percent) (Ogden et al., 2020). Childhood obesity is a significant public health problem as it is linked to negative physical and emotional health (An et al., 2017). Thus, understanding the role that neighborhoods play in worsening (or not) this problem is important. In this paper, we investigate this issue by estimating the effect of local neighborhood violent crime on child and adolescent weight and physical fitness.

Existing research that examines the relationship between crime and weight outcomes (BMI, obesity, overweight) yields mixed findings. While some studies show that neighborhood crime is associated with higher weight (Borrell et al., 2016; Daniels et al., 2021; Miranda et al., 2012; Theall et al., 2019), others find no relationship even when there is a negative association with physical activity (Burdette and Whitaker, 2004, 2005). In a recent review of the literature, Yu and Lippert (2016) echo these mixed findings. The literature that focuses on the relationship between neighborhood crime and physical activity is also mixed. Some studies find that neighborhood crime is negatively correlated with physical activity (Molnar et al., 2004; Yu and Lippert, 2016), while others find no association (Lovasi et al., 2011), and a third group of papers finds a positive correlation (Jago et al., 2006; Robinson et al., 2016). While valuable, existing studies often rely on small samples that may be underpowered to detect statistically significant changes and are largely cross-sectional. Further, prior research often uses self-reported measures of weight, physical activity, and exposure to neighborhood crime. The few papers that use objective crime measures often rely on large area-level crime rates that may imperfectly capture exposure to violence at the micro-neighborhood level. Finally, existing evidence is primarily descriptive – capturing associations between crime and weight outcomes (or physical activity) – leaving open myriad potential underlying causal mechanisms.

Our study overcomes many of these limitations. First, we use objective measures of weight and physical fitness obtained from the NYC Fitnessgram, an annual assessment of the weight and physical fitness of public school students in K-12 schools. Second, our data include the universe of NYC public school students, presenting a much larger sample than previous research, and allowing us to explore heterogeneity by gender and age. Third, we use point specific crime data that include the latitude and longitude of reported crimes from the New York City Police Department (NYPD). We geocode these data to a student’s residential location allowing us to construct crime exposure measures within a very small geographic area around a student’s home. This is a particularly important point as recent evidence shows aggregate measures of crime may lead to underestimating the relationship between crime and physical activity relative to more localized measures (Astell-Burt et al., 2015). Finally, the detailed nature of our crime data also allows us to explore the effect of violent crime as separate and distinct from the effect of property crimes.

The empirical approach we use exploits variation in the timing of violent crimes on a student’s residential H-block2 relative to the dates of the Fitnessgram assessment each year, which vary by school, grade, and year. Specifically, we estimate regression models with a large complement of student demographic controls and census tract fixed effects, thereby comparing the weight outcomes of students exposed to violent crime within a very small area around their residence (H-block) with students not exposed to crime near their homes but living in the same neighborhood (census tract). This approach should yield credibly causal estimates of the relationship between violent crime and weight and fitness if, within neighborhoods, exposure to violent crime on a student’s H-block before the Fitnessgram is as if random after conditioning for student-level characteristics, grade, year, and census tract fixed effects. This approach allows us to isolate more robust estimates of the relationship between violent crime and child weight than prior studies in this area.