Food attitudes, Ideal Body Weight and Social Norms Fabrice Etilé (INRA, CEPREMAP and HEDG) ¤ Hugo Harari-Kermadec (INRA and CREST) DO NOT CITE DO NOT QUOTE August 18, 2006 Abstract This paper uses French data on ideal body weight and food at- titudes to investigate the role of social norms in the obesity control problem. Using …ndings from the sociological and psychological liter- ature, we argue that a proxy measure of the social norms is the mean ideal BMI by occupation, gender and age group. The di¤erence be- tween actual and ideal BMIs is interpreted as a proxy measure of weight satisfaction, which takes into account both social norms and adjustment costs of deviation from one’s habitual weight. Using this conjecture, we derive an equation for the ideal BMI, and we propose a new empirical likelihood estimator to estimate it. Social norms have a signi…cant e¤ect on individual perceptions of ideal BMI in the subsample of those individuals who want to slim. Since ideal BMI predicts a number of attitudes toward food in the whole sample, the public policies of obesity should take into considerations the social multiplier e¤ect produced by social norms. ¤ Corresponding author: Fabrice Etilé, INRA-ALISS, 65 Boulevard de Brandebourg, 94205 Ivry-sur-Seine cedex. E-mail: etile@ivry.inra.fr 1