We evaluate the effect of differences in child care and food environments on obesity among children in the age group of four to six years. To address non-random selection of children into different child care settings, we first predict market price of child care and market wages, and then...

Paper for presentation at the Northeastern Agricultural & Resource Economics Association’s Workshop on Economics and Child Nutrition Programs, AAEA & NAREA Joint Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 23, 2011.

This paper provides quantitative estimates of the effect of proximity to fast food restaurants and grocery stores on obesity in urban food markets. Our empirical model combined georeferenced micro data on access to fast food restaurants and grocery stores with data about salient personal...

Xi Chen acknowledges generous Doctoral Research Grant from the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University and precious data set provided by the Development Strategy and Governance Division at IFPRI. Conference Travel Grant provided by the Department of Applied Economics and...

This article questions the assumption of symmetric consumption behavior in the conventional analysis of intra-household calorie allocation. It proposes a framework that takes into account asymmetric consumption behavior due to liquidity constraints or loss aversion. Using panel data from China,...

We employ a combination of survey design and econometric techniques to explore ways to deal with health concerns in restoration projects where environmental injuries are severe. We use data from a referendum contingent valuation survey for a natural resource restoration project to demonstrate...

This study attempts to evaluate the economic benefits of the country of origin labeling (COOL) in Taiwan. A Vickrey second-price sealed-bid auction was conducted to estimate the consumer’s willingness to pay for Taiwan products vs. those from China and Vietnam. Our experiment was designed to...

First developed meat import demand system, disaggegating poultry meat into two products, cooked poultry (safe)and uncooked poultry meat (less safe). The model includes, beef, pork, and other meats as well.

This paper is based on an ongoing joint work with David Sahn and Xiaobo Zhang.