the well being of the elderly and wage arrears in russia about one third of households with elderly were not paid their wages during the mid 1990s in russia applying matching estimations to a nationally representative survey the study shows that wage arrears had detrimental effects on the well being of the elderly in these families salaries in households with wage arrears dropped by almost two thirds income fell by more than one third and poverty doubled behavioral responses were only partly effective the net revenue loss amounted to five sixths of the wage shock for men and nine tenths of the wage shock for women the elderly cut back on food expenses by reducing food purchases and adjusting their diet towards cheaper calories economising on expenses equal to around one quarter of the wage reduction caloric and protein intakes dropped although less than income and the nutritional content of food consumption with regard to vitamins and minerals deteriorated wage arrears worsened male health more than female health even though the decline in income was comparable functional limitations rose by 8 for men and 3 for women and self rated health declined by 2 5 for men and 0 5 for women old age men with arrears were almost twice as likely to die before the next survey round and functional limitations of surviving men rose by more than 10 by contrast there was no impact on the next round s health status of old age women a rich data set is used to discount alternative explanations including feedback from health to income other economic factors health service access health behavior and environmental conditions jel i12 i30 j14 j30

a soft pillow for hard times economic insecurity food intake and body weight in russia this study investigates causal effects of economic insecurity on subjective anxiety food intake and weight outcomes a review of psychological and nutrition studies highlights the complexity of processes at work on each stage of this causal chain econometric analyses trace the effects along the hypothesized pathway using detailed household panel data from the russia longitudinal monitoring survey from 1994 to 2005 economic insecurity measures serve as key explanatory variables in regressions and are instrumented by exogenous regional indicators results support a causal chain from economic insecurity to weight outcomes for some population subgroups in contrast to the leading hypothesis that economic insecurity increases body weight i find strong evidence of a decreasing effect among women results suggest further that consumption of foods rich in sugar responds strongly to higher levels of economic insecurity heterogeneous impacts of economic insecurity on body weight call for individual level interventions rather than large scale action

children s welfare exposure and subsequent development abstract we examine the extent to which children are exposed to the welfare system through their mother s receipt of benefits and its impact on several developmental outcomes using data from the matched mother child file from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy we find that children s welfare exposure is substantial by age 10 over one third of all children will have lived in a welfare household black non hispanic children face a much higher rate of exposure simple correlations suggest a strong negative relationship between maternal welfare receipt and children s outcomes in this paper we implement three alternative strategies instrumental variables sibling differences and child fixed effects models designed to identify whether this correlation can be attributed to the mother s welfare receipt directly or to other characteristics of mothers who receive welfare regardless of whether or not those characteristics are observable to the researcher based on the results of all three estimation strategies we find little evidence of any causal link between maternal welfare receipt and children s developmental outcomes

assessing the importance of health and nutrition related factors on food demand a variable preference investigation the importance of health nutrition related factors and demographics on food consumption is assessed based on consumer demand using a variable preferences approach results of the models show that diet disease individual s race region of residence urbanization education and perceived importance of taste influence the consumption of various food groups economic and policy implications of the results are discussed in the paper

economic policy and equality of opportunity we employ eop definitions that have appeared in the philosophical literature on distributive justice and apply it to a formal economic model which incorporates human capital investment and luck within and across generations the human capital acquisition technology features multiple stages of parental investments during childhood and on the job investments in adulthood the benchmark model features an intergenerational borrowing constraint education and low income subsidies which are financed by a progressive income tax the model is calibrated to the u s in 1990 on which we operationalize philosophical concepts by using the children s continuation values as outcomes and the state space of the recursive decision problem as circumstances this reveals that intergenerational investments should be accounted for when comparing measures of eop when conditioning on parental luck instead of outcomes eop looks much larger luck is overwhelmed by human capital accumulation in contrast when looking at children s net wealth instead of lifetime earnings eop looks worse intergenerational borrowing constraints are more pronounced in wealth than in earnings in counterfactual experiments we find that education subsidies increase utilitarian welfare and decrease overall inequality but does little to promote eop this is for two reasons when one takes the view that intergenerational efforts should be rewarded there is little room for improvement in eop to begin with on the other hand when one takes the view that intergenerational efforts should not be rewarded much stronger redistribution is needed for the policies to have a quantitative impact

is health care a necessity or a luxury pooled estimates of income elasticity from us state level data this paper provides new evidence on the income elasticity of health care by combining stationarity and cointegration tests of health care expenditure and incomes with estimates of the cointegrating relationship between them a recently updated dataset of health care expenditures and disposable personal income for the us states for the years 1966 1998 is used the principal findings are that health care expenditures and incomes at the state level are non stationary and cointegrated dynamic ols cointegrating regressions of the pooled state time series estimate the income elasticity of health care at 0 817 to 0 844 well below unity confirming that health care expenditure even at the aggregate level is a necessity good

a new approach to understanding labour supply of disabled people abstractthe main interest of this article is to propose an individual utility maximization model to explain the low participation of disabled people we account for heterogeneity of preferences and

agricultural household models extensions applications and policy this book presents the basic model of an agricultural household that underlies most of the case studies undertaken so far the model assumes that households are price takers and is therefore recursive the decisions modeled include those affecting production and the demand for inputs and those affecting consumption and the supply of labor comparative results on selected elasticities are presented for a number of economies the empirical significance of the approach is demonstrated in a comparison of models that treat production and consumption decisions separately and those in which the decisionmaking process is recursive the book summarizes the implications of agricultural pricing policy for the welfare of farm households marketed surplus the demand for nonagricultural goods and services the rural labor market budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings in addition it is shown that the basic model can be extended in order to explore the effects of government policy on crop composition nutritional status health saving and investment and to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the effects on budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings methodological topics primarily the data requirements of the basic model and its extensions along with aggregation market interaction uncertainty and market imperfections are discussed the most important methodological issues the question of the recursive property of these models is also discussed

nutritional status during an economic crisis evidence from russia between 1996 and 1998 russia experienced a spectacular decline in economic activity which was followed by a dramatic rebound between 1998 and 2000 we use panel data to examine the impact of variation in household resources on six dimensions of nutritional status distinguishing longer run from short term fluctuations in resources nutritional status is very resilient to short term variation in household resources gross energy intake adult weight and child stature change very little as expenditure deviates from its long run average longer run resources have a substantively large positive and significant effect on energy intake diet quality adult weight and child stature the evidence indicates that individuals and households are able to weather short term fluctuations in economic resources at least in terms of maintaining body mass and energy intake increased globalisation has resulted in many less developed countries becoming more integrated into world markets this integration carries both benefits and costs for the populations of those countries an oft cited cost is elevated risk of exposure to economic fluctuations which has been manifest in several spectacular economic crises across the globe in the last few decades there is however little evidence on the extent to which individuals and families are able to mitigate deleterious effects of these economic upheavals on their well being in spite of its importance for understanding the consequences of globalisation this article provides new evidence on this issue specifically we examine the relationship between several dimensions of nutritional well being and variation in household resources during the russian economic crisis in the late 1990s the economies of the former soviet bloc have been especially volatile since the transition to market based economies which began in the early 1990s nowhere has this been more true than in russia where in the last half of 1998 real gdp collapsed by around 30 and then rapid growth brought the economy back to its pre crisis level by 2000 the time path of changes in gdp is closely mimicked by changes in the incomes and expenditures of russian households using extremely rich longitudinal household survey data from the russian longitudinal monitoring survey rlms we examine the impact of these large fluctuations in household resources on nutrient intake and on anthropometric markers of nutritional status at the individual level in so doing we address an important issue in the literature regarding the extent to which households in low income settings are able

the impact of obesity on wages abstract previous studies of the relationship between body weight and wages have found mixed results this paper uses a larger data set and several regres sion strategies in an attempt to generate more consistent estimates of the effect of weight on wages differences across gender race and ethnicity are explored this paperjnds that weight lowers wages for white females ols esti mates indicate that a difference in weight of two standard deviations roughly 65 pounds is associated with a difference in wages of 9 percent in absolute value this is equivalent to the wage effect of roughly one and a half years of education or three years of work experience negative cor relations between weight and wages observed for other gender ethnic groups appear to be due to unobserved heterogeneity i introduction several previous studies have found among females a negative cor relation between body weight and wages there exist three broad categories of ex planations for this finding the first explanation is that obesity lowers wages for example by lowering productivity or because of workplace discrimination the sec ond is that low wages cause obesity this would be true if poorer people consume

effects of food prices and consumer income on nutrient availability economic factors such as food prices and consumer income affect food choices with consequences for the availability of nutrients a new research model is developed to estimate how the availability of 28 nutrients would change as consumers alter their food purchases in response to changes in food prices and income through the interdependent food demand relationships

prices and health identifying the effects of nutrition exercise and medication choices on blood pressure biomedical studies suggest that a person s behavior matters to health but these studies usually treat human choice as exogenous this study shows that individual choices on nutrient intake exercise and use of medication are influenced by exogenous food prices wages and non labor income using these exogenous variables as instruments for endogenous behavior makes a big difference in the estimated impact of nutrient intake exercise and medication on blood pressure for example application of instrumental variables methods changes the impact of sodium on blood pressure from positive to negative and significant in his 1993 nobel prize speech economic historian robert fogel documented how dramatic improvements in human health and lifespan over the last century have increased labor productivity and economic growth these health improvements were largely ascribed to better nutrition and to an enhanced ability of consumers to transform nutrition information into desired health states at the same time fogel called for joint use of biomedical and economic techniques of analysis so that the consequences of better nutrition for human well being can be more deeply probed the combined techniques would yield insights otherwise unobtainable when relying on one of the disciplines alone fogel s plea for combined techniques rarely has been heeded either in the biomedicine or in the health economics literature biomedical studies adhere strictly to a mind body dualism

poverty food consumption and nutrition during the transition to the market economy in eastern historically average reported levels of food intake in eastern europe have been considerably higher than in most middleincome countries according to food balance sheet data average calories proteins and fats in terms of availability per capita rose continuously over the 1961 1988 period and generally exceeded the intake requirements established by the world health organization who food and agriculture organization 1991 while it may rightly be argued that these data offer little information about the effective control over food by consumers in different income groups in the case of pre reform eastern europe full employment low income inequality and low food prices generally ensured a minimal level of food intake even for those in the bottom deciles of the income distribution while undernutrition did not generally represent a problem considerable imbalances affected the diet of most people in the region particularly in urban areas and among low income groups food intake was characterized by a high consumption of cholesterol rich products such as eggs and animal fats sugar salt bread and alcohol and a low intake of good quality meat fruit and vegetables and vegetable oils the data in table 1 clearly illustrate this situation for russia and can be taken as representative of the entire region low income families consumed less food per capita while their diet was characterized by greater intake both in relative and absolute terms of bread and fats and a lower consumption of more nutritious and healthy foods the dietary imbalances implicit in this consumption pattern caused an abnormally high incidence of nutritionally related health problems including a high prevalence of overweight people cardiovascular diseases micronutrient deficiencies and anemia in addition a fairly high prevalence of low birth weight lbw and low breastfeeding rates were common in the region inadequate breastfeeding represented a critical nutritional problem for young children as milk substitutes and baby foods were generally in short supply

on the intergenerational transmission of economic status we present a model in which human capital investments occur over the life cycle and across generations a la becker and tomes the human capital technology features multiple stages of childhood investments college and life cycle accumulation the model can explain a wide range of intergenerational relationships while remaining empirically consistent with cross sectional inequality much of the latter is determined by early investments in children so that borrowing constraints faced by young parents are important for understanding the persistence of economic status across generations education subsidies especially early on can significantly reduce the intergenerational persistence of economic status

are estimates of calorie income fxelasticities too high a recalibration of the plausible range abstract the wide range of calorie income elasticities in the literature results in large part from the particular calorie and income variables used for estimation elasticities across four estimation techniques and four calorie income variable pairs for a sample of philippine farm households ranged from 0 03 to 0 59 estimates associated with calorie availability are biased upwards first because random errors in measuring food purchases are transmitted by construction both to calorie availability and total expenditures and second because the residual difference between family calorie intake and household calorie availability will often increase with income the calorie intake total expenditure variable pair gives the preferred elasticity estimate in the 0 08 0 14 range

determinants of healthcare spending a state level analysis within the high and rising level of healthcare spending for the us as a whole is substantial variation in spending across states yet relatively little attention has been given to the empirical analysis of interstate differences in aggregate healthcare expenditures and therefore little empirical evidence exists at the state level to guide policymakers using data for all 50 states for the year 1998 we estimate an empirical model that includes structural and reduced form healthcare spending equations and a health production function to assess the significance size and relative importance of factors that prior research indicates may play an important role in explaining interstate variation in medical care expenditures and the main pathways through which they operate our results indicate higher levels of healthcare spending for state populations with higher income less education fewer uninsured residents less healthy lifestyles larger proportion of elderly residents greater availability of medical

the labour market impact of body weight in china a semiparametric analysis while a positive wage effect of body mass index bmi is widely observed in low income developing countries a negative wage effect of bmi is often observed in high income developed countries to fill the gap between these previous findings we investigate the relationship between body weight and wages in transition economies we focus on china whose rapid economic growth of the 1990s was followed by a rapid increase in overweight and obesity while still experiencing significant food insecurity and underweight we first use several parametric regression strategies to obtain a consistent estimate of the wage effects of weight second we adopt a semiparametric partially linear model that allows for endogeneity of weight parametric regressions provide mixed results and the sign and magnitude of their estimates are sensitive to the choice of samples and regression strategies semiparametric estimates provide evidence of a wage penalty for very heavy and thin persons among both men and women the wage pena

income shocks consumption wealth and human capital evidence from russia abstract using the russia longitudinal monitoring survey this article investigates how russian households consumption responds to income shocks and in particular how household wealth and human capital affect the households ability to smooth consumption an instrumental variable estimation method with household fixed effects is implemented after correcting for potential problems of sample attrition using the inverse probability weighting method the article finds that household consumption in russia is only partially protected from idiosyncratic shocks the analysis also provides evidence that wealthier households can better smooth their consumption furthermore changes in income have less impact on consumption when households have members with higher education levels wealth effects are more pronounced in rural areas while education effects are stronger for urban households

the granger causality between health care expenditure and output a panel data approach this study investigates the granger causality relationship between real per capita gdp and real per capita health care expenditure by employing a large macro panel data set with a var representatio

the price of virtue this article offers new evidence on the determinants of u s unwed birth rates from 1981 to 1990 we show that illegitimacy rates are positively and significantly correlated with payments under the aid to families with dependent children program over a period in which real afdc payments declined we attribute this result to a decline in the social sanctions for illegitimacy because social sanctions declined so did the cost of deviance as well as the price for which unwed women sold their virtue

macroeconomic adjustment under regime change from social contract to arab spring abstract against the backdrop of the arab spring protests we examine macroeconomic stabilization under regime shift we model this as a dynamic interaction between a government and a profit maximizing firm the former imposes the state of technology some value of rent extraction labor market rigidities and time preference the firm conditional on these factors and the optimally determined inflation rate sets labor demand given its extractive nature there is a continuous probability of a political regime shift characterized by a hazard function we compare state and non state contingent forms the model is able to rationalize the early growth and developmental gains of many arab economies and their subsequent reversal as well as the later stalling of economic reforms the model provides a novel analysis of the evolution of the arab economies the shifting time preferences of policy makers and their interaction with economic reforms

international dimensions of obesity and overweight related problems an economics perspective obesity is a growing concern new world health organization who figures indicate that obesity is spreading around the world as a global epidemic according to the who there are more people suffering from overweight related problems than malnutrition globally there are more than 1 billion adults who are overweight and at least 300 million of them are clinically obese while 800 million suffer from malnutrition who 2004 the economic costs due to obesity can be burdensome currently in the united states medical costs associated with obesity and smoking account for about 9 each of all health expenditures finkelstein fiebelkorn and wang u s obesity attributable medical expenditures reached 75 billion in 2003 obesity however is important not only from an economic perspective but also from a social perspective the social consequences of obesity are serious and multiple studies have shown that obesity affects in a negative and statistically significant way personal and working relations earnings and wages particularly for females cawley overall obesity is a complex phenomenon several recent economic studies have explored the role of different cultural and sociodemographic factors on obesity rates leaving genetics aside obesity is caused by the consumption of too many calories and or low expenditures of calories i e low physical activity consequently most published economic research provided a justification for the increased growth of obesity rates by analyzing several factors that may contribute to this imbalance of caloric consumption and usage see chou grossman and saffer cutler glaeser and shapiro lakdawalla and philipson philipson and posner there are mainly two arguments that could justify the growth of overweight problems around the world some researchers argue that obesity growth is mainly due to a higher intake of calories while others state that obesity is mainly caused by a lower expenditure of caloies in daily activities in line with the calorie consumption argument cutler glaeser and shapiro stated that americans have become more obese over the past twenty five years primarily due to the consumption of more calories analyzing changes in food consumption between the mid 1970s and the mid 1990s for

breaking the cycle the effect of education on welfare receipt among children of welfare recipients abstract we examine the impact of high school graduation on the probability individuals from welfare backgrounds use welfare themselves our data consist of administrative educational records for grade 12 students in a canadian province linked with their own and their parents welfare records we address potential endogeneity problems by 1 controlling for ability using past test scores 2 using an instrument for graduation based on school principal fixed effects and 3 using a heckman singer type unobserved heterogeneity estimator graduation would reduce the probability of welfare receipt of drop outs by 1 2 to 3 4 effects are larger for individuals from troubled family backgrounds and low income neighbourhoods

external constraints and endogenous growth why didn t some countries benefit from capital flows empirical evidence on the growth benefits of capital inflows is mixed the growth benefits accruing from capital inflows also appear to be larger for high savings countries we explain this phenomenon using an olg model of endogenous growth in open economies with borrowing constraints that can generate both positive and negative growth effects of capital inflows the amount an economy can borrow is restricted by an endogenous enforcement constraint in our setting with physical capital and a pay as you go pensions system the steady state is unique however it can either be constrained or unconstrained in a constrained economy opening up to equity and fdi inflows can be bad for growth because it makes the domestic interest rate too low which endogenously tightens borrowing constraints agents decrease savings and investment in productivity enhancing activities resulting in lower growth results are reversed in an unconstrained economy we also provide a quantitative analysis of these constraints and some policy implications

measuring economic insecurity we provide a systematic treatment of the notion of economic insecurity assuming that an individual s sentiment of insecurity depends on the current wealth level and its variations experienced in the past we think of wealth as a comprehensive variable encompassing anything that may help in coping with adverse occurrences the current wealth level could also be interpreted as incorporating the individual s evaluation of future prospects variations in wealth experienced in the recent past are given higher weight than experiences that occurred in the more distant past two classes of measures are characterized with sets of plausible and intuitive axioms

savings and nutrition at low incomes while many development theorists assume saving propensities vary among different groups there has been limited theoretical justification for this view this paper analyzes two complementary theories stressing the effect on saving of physiological consequences of poor nutrition at low incomes one influence is on the probability of survival another is on workers productivity either effect means that the average propensity to save can rise with income issues considered include annuities exogenous changes in survival and efficiency implications for the efficiency wage theory of unemployment and distinctions between wage and nonwage income implications of nutritional effects for econometric specification of saving functions are stressed

will developing country nutrition improve with income a case study for rural south india aggregate estimates of food expenditure are consistent with such a possibility implying income expenditure elasticities close to one however the high degree of aggregation at which such estimates are made means that the considerable increase in price per nutrient as income increases is ignored and the nutrient elasticities are therefore overstated estimates for a rural south indian sample indicate that this bias is considerable and that the true nutrient elasticities with respect to income may be close to zero

economic assessment of nutritional recommendations abstract the effect of consumers compliance with nutritional recommendations is uncertain because of potentially complex substitutions to lift this uncertainty we adapt a model of consumer behaviour under rationing to the case of linear nutritional constraints dietary adjustments are derived from information on consumer preferences consumption levels and nutritional contents of foods a calibration exercise simulates for different income groups how the french diet would respond to various nutrition recommendations and those behavioural adjustments are translated into health outcomes through the dietron epidemiological model this allows for the ex ante comparison of the efficiency equity and health effects of ten nutritional recommendations although most recommendations impose significant taste costs on consumers they are highly cost effective with the recommendations targeting salt saturated fat and fruits and vegetables f v ranking highest in terms of efficiency most recommendations are also economically progressive with the exception of that targeting f v

thresholds in the process of international financial integration abstract the financial crisis has re ignited the fierce debate about the merits of financial globalization and its implications for growth especially for developing countries the empirical literature has not been able to conclusively establish the presumed growth benefits of financial integration indeed a new literature proposes that the indirect benefits of financial integration may be more important than the traditional financing channel emphasized in previous analyses a major complication however is that there seem to be certain threshold levels of financial and institutional development that an economy needs to attain before it can derive the indirect benefits and reduce the risks of financial openness in this paper we develop a unified empirical framework for characterizing such threshold conditions we find that there are clearly identifiable thresholds in variables such as financial depth and institutional quality the cost benefit trade off from financial openness improves significantly once these threshold conditions are satisfied we also find that the thresholds are lower for foreign direct investment and portfolio equity liabilities compared to those for debt liabilities

household composition labor markets and labor demand testing for separation in agricultural household models this paper tests the separation of farm labor supply and labor demand decisions using the observation that household composition is an important determinant of farm labor use with nonseparation after assessing the conditions under which the test has power against several alternatives an empirical model is developed to test the proposition that farm employment is independent of family composition the model is estimated on a data set from rural java the null hypothesis that farm labor allocation decisions are independent of household structure is not rejected the results are robust to different specifications of the labor demand function copyright 1992 by the econometric society

the intergenerational transmission of welfare receipt a nonparametric bounds analysis using a nonparametric bounding method and data from the panel study of income dynamics i examine the effect that growing up in a household that receives aid to families with dependent children af

welfare based income insecurity in the us and germany evidence from harmonized panel data this paper develops normative approaches for measuring individual level income insecurity using concepts derived from expected utility theory and prospect theory we build a suite of measures designed to capture various facets of psychologically distressing income risk we present an application for the us and germany from 1993 2013 employing conditionally heteroskedastic fixed effects models to generate predictive densities for future incomes our results reveal much higher levels of income risk in the us relative to germany which can be mostly attributed to a higher level of autonomous time invariant volatility state by state variations in liberal conservative political administrations partially explain our results and we find some evidence that trade exposure is a contributing factor in the us

women in transition changes in gender wage differentials in eastern europe and the former soviet union under state socialism women fared relatively well in the labor market female male wage differentials were similar to those in the west and female labor force participation rates were among the h

financial integration entrepreneurial risk and global dynamics abstract how does financial integration impact capital accumulation current account dynamics and cross country inequality we investigate this question within a two country general equilibrium incomplete markets model that focuses on the importance of idiosyncratic entrepreneurial risk a risk that introduces not only a precautionary motive for saving but also a wedge between the interest rate and the marginal product of capital our contribution is to show that this friction provides a simple explanation for the emergence of global imbalances a resolution to the empirical puzzle that capital often fails to flow from the rich or slow growing countries to the poor or fast growing ones and a set of policy lessons regarding the intertemporal costs and benefits of capital account liberalization

protecting energy intakes against income shocks whether and how changes in economic circumstances or household income affect individuals diet and nutritional intakes is of substantial interest for policy purposes this paper exploits a period of substantial income volatility in russia to examine the extent to which as well as how individuals protect their energy intakes in the face of unanticipated shocks to household income using rich data from the russia longitudinal monitoring survey our results suggest that households use substitution disproportionally cutting back spending on non foods to protect spending on foods change the composition of the consumption basket and increase the consumption of cheaper calories taken together however we find that total energy intakes as well as the nutritional composition of the diet are almost fully protected against income shocks specifically we find that 12 16 of the effect of permanent income shocks on food expenditures is transmitted to energy intakes with 84 88 protected through insurance mechanisms

health and financial strain evidence from the survey of consumer finances using data from the survey of consumer finances this study examines the relationship between health status and financial strain controlling for the dual endogeneity between the two factors simultaneous two stage probit models are estimated for self reported health status and three measures of financial strain the results from all three models indicate that poor health significantly increases the probability of financial strain there is little evidence that financial strain contributes to poor health the findings suggest that severe health conditions may result in larger financial burdens while large financial burdens are unlikely to accelerate a decline in health status in the end health may be contributing to widening financial disparities especially among the poor who are in poor health

obesity and employment as predictors of diabetes in mexican americans findings from a longitudinal study this article examines changes in weight loss and employment on the incidence and management of diabetes over an eight year period using data from three panel waves of the border epidemiologic study on aging collected between 1995 and 2003 estimation results from a set of logit regression models reveal that obese individuals who lose weight over an eight year period are less likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than those who remain obese in waves two and three moreover employment an important covariate in all three waves is associated with the lower likelihood of being diagnosed with diabetes in all results confirm findings from cross sectional data that point to overweight and obesity as important predictors of diabetes and further support public policy efforts that aim at controlling the rising incidence of diabetes through tailored interventions

alcohol consumption smoking and wages the good health of an individual is a combination of uncontrollable factors that includes genetics and random events and controllable factors through the regulation of activities such as smoking and drinking since the work of grossman in the 1970s a significant relationship between health and earnings has been predicted in this present paper the 1995 australian national health survey is used to examine simultaneously the effects of drinking and smoking on wages to model the interaction of smoking with alcohol consumption separate models are fitted for smokers and nonsmokers these models account for potential selectivity bias resulting from the decision to smoke and endogeneity arising from a potential causal relationship between earnings and alcohol consumption

using weather variability to estimate the response of savings to transitory income in thailand this paper measures the extent to which farmers are able to use savings and dissavings to smooth consumption in response to unexpected shocks to income time series information on regional rainfall is used to construct estimates of transitory income due to rainfall shocks the relationship between these measures of transitory income and savings indicates that farm households save a significantly higher fraction of transitory income than nontransitory income jel d91 016 the incomes of farm households in developing countries are notorious for being both low and uncertain policies that increase the incomes of farmers may well be different

information endogeneity and consumer health behaviour application to dietary intakes due to heightened public health interest a growing number of consumer health behaviour studies are focusing on the effect of health information on the demand for health inputs and outcomes many of these studies however have overlooked the potential endogeneity of information variables stemming from unobserved individual heterogeneity due to simultaneity bias ignoring endogeneity may lead to inaccurate estimates of informational effects on health behaviour using dietary intake data for fat saturated fat cholesterol and fibre this paper illustrates the pitfalls of treating health information related to these nutrients as exogenous variables in their demand equations in most of the estimated models the exogeneity of information is statistically rejected when the information variables are treated as exogenous variables their effects on dietary intakes are underestimated the estimated effects of key intake determinants such as income education ethnicity and race are also different in such a

a simple test of consumption insurance are consumers effectively insured against idiosyncratic shocks to income or wealth either by formal institutions such as charities private insurance and government programs or by informal mechanisms such as gifts and loans from relatives friends and neighbors under full insurance consumption growth should be cross sectionally independent of idiosyncratic variables that are exogenous to consumers this proposition is tested by cross sectional regressions of consumption growth on a variety of exogenous variables full insurance is rejected for long illness and involuntary job loss but not for spells of unemployment loss of work due to strike and an involuntary move

calories obesity and health in oecd countries theoretical models suggest that decisions about diet weight and health status are endogenous within a utility maximization framework in this article we model these behavioural relationships in a fixed effect panel setting using a simultaneous equation system with a view to determining whether economic variables can explain the trends in calorie consumption obesity and health in organization for economic cooperation and development oecd countries and the large differences among the countries the empirical model shows that progress in medical treatment and health expenditure mitigates mortality from diet related diseases despite rising obesity rates while the model accounts for endogeneity and serial correlation results are affected by data limitations

non separable time preferences novelty consumption and body weight theory and evidence from the east german transition to capitalism abstract this paper develops a dynamic model to illustrate how diet and body weight change when novel food products become available to consumers we propose a microfounded test to empirically discriminate between habit and taste formation in intertemporal preferences moreover we show that novelty consumption and endogenous preferences can explain the persistent correlation between economic development and obesity by empirically studying the german reunification we find that east germans consumed more novel western food and gained more weight than west germans when a larger variety of food products became readily accessible after the fall of the wall the observed consumption patterns suggest that food consumption features habit formation

economic stressors and the demand for fattening foods a broad and growing literature suggests that uncertainty with respect to income employment and or the financial resources necessary to buy food may cause people to gain weight the theory inspired by theory and evidence from behavioral ecology posits that economic insecurity triggers a physiological fattening response but the mechanisms by which weight gain occurs e g physical activity caloric intake dietary quality basal metabolism depression are not known this paper reviews and synthesizes evidence supporting a dietary quality mechanism in which economic insecurity triggers a shift in food preferences toward fattening foods interestingly the foods to which individuals appear to be drawn under these circumstances are those which the anthropological evidence suggests would have been eaten in pre industrial societies during periods of seasonal food scarcity this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

social interactions and the contemporaneous determinants of individuals weight obesity and overweight are central issues in the public health debate in most developed countries in this debate some of the socio economic determinants of obesity and overweight are still relatively unexplored this paper presents an empirical examination of the possible influence of social interactions on contemporaneous obesity and over underweight a joint estimation model for obesity and self image is applied to a sample for spain taken from the european union household panel for 1998 the results suggest that obesity might be in part a social phenomenon connected to individuals social life

policies to stimulate growth should we invest in health or education empirical studies in the literature on economic growth have focused on the affect of education and yet knowles and owen 1995 1997 found health proxied by life expectancy to be highly statistically significant with education having a modest role this study extends their model and employs variables that are more conducive to policy formulation calorific intake and school enrolment ratios results suggest that reducing undernutrition would only make a modest contribution to economic growth while increasing enrolment ratios especially secondary has a positive and more significant effect policies to increase economic growth should favour investments in education over health

net foreign assets productivity and real exchange rates in constrained economies empirical evidence suggests that real exchange rates rer behave differently in developed and developing countries we develop an overlapping generations two sector exogenous growth model in which rer determination may depend on the country s capacity to borrow from international capital markets the country faces a constraint on capital inflows with high domestic savings the rer only depends on the productivity spread between sectors balassa samuelson effect if the constraint is too tight and or domestic savings too low the rer depends on both net foreign assets transfer effect and productivity we then analyze the empirical implications of the model and find that in accordance with the theory the rer is mainly driven by productivity and net foreign assets in constrained countries and by productivity in unconstrained countries

schooling health knowledge and obesity the connection between schooling and health is well documented an important empirical issue that needs to be examined however is whether schooling s effects are due to individual health knowledge differences this empirical study examines this issue with an increasingly important health indicator obesity since provision of health knowledge is a major tool of public agencies promoting health this empirical study uses a new direct measure of health knowledge to test this hypothesis the results show that knowledge is inversely related to the probability that an individual is obese schooling s effects on relative weight and the probability of being obese are explained by differences in knowledge this result may imply that schooling s effect on the allocative efficiency of the household production of health is the main reason schooling is linked to health behaviour the result also may imply that the most effective method of health education is to highlight the disease element of poor dietary habits a

debt constrained asset markets we develop a theory of general equilibrium with endogenous debt limits in the form of individual rationality constraints similar to those in the dynamic consistency literature if an agent defaults on a contract he can be excluded from future contingent claims markets trading and can have his assets seized he cannot be excluded from spot markets trading however and he has some private endowments that cannot be seized all information is publicly held and common knowledge and there is a complete set of contingent claims markets since there is complete information an agent cannot enter into a contract in which he would have an incentive to default in some state in general there is only partial insurance variations in consumption may be imperfectly correlated across agents interest rates may be lower than they would be without constraints and equilibria may be pareto ranked

afdc participation across generations william julius wilson s influential book the truly disadvantaged 1987 has sparked a vigorous debate about the existence and causes of an urban underclass while there is still no clear agreement about definitions the growing literature on the underclass focuses both on traits of the current generation and the traits of their parents if an underclass exists its current members are assumed to live in deteriorating inner cities to experience long spells of joblessness or welfare dependency and or to engage in illegal and antisocial activities furthermore these traits are assumed to be correlated across generations leading to a cycle of deprivation in this paper i focus on one such link across generations by examining the correlation in welfare participation of daughters and their parents i first present the state of knowledge about the extent to which children of parents who received aid to families with dependent children afdc are themselves more likely to participate in this welfare program second i discuss the remaining gaps in our understanding and give several contrasting altemative explanations for the observed correlation each with a different policy implication