The literature assessing the efficacy of the Food Stamp Program, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), has long puzzled over positive associations between food stamp receipt and various undesirable health outcomes such as food insecurity. Assessing the impact of food...

The health consequences of child labor may take time to manifest themselves. This studyexamines whether children who began working at a young age experience increasedincidence of illness or physical disability as adults.. When child labor and schooling aretreated as chosen without consideration...

Malnutrition and food deprivation, which are concentrated in poor countries, have been along-term concern of economists, but as per capita income in developed countries has grown in the20th century, a new problem of over-nutrition leading to obesity has occurred. This paper developsmodels of...

This paper introduces endogenous longevity risk in an otherwisestandard overlapping generations model with capital. In the model, an agent mayincrease the length of her old age by incurring investments in her own health fundedfrom her wage income. Such private health investments are more...

This paper presents a twoequationmodel of joint outcomes on an individual’sdecision to binge drink and on his/her annual labor market earnings. The primary data source isthe 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), 19791994.We showthat binge drinking behavior is quite...

This survey reviews the existing literature, identifying the contribution of agriculture, schooling, and nutrition to economic growth and development over time and across countries. Particular attention is paid to the roles of improvements in agricultural technology and of the human capital of...

This paper addressed the puzzling resistance of Presidents of southern African countries to food aid in 2002, given near certain starvation and long-term negative health effects of malnutrition of their constituents. First, I show that NGOs led by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are...

Health diagnosis indicators used as explanatory variables in econometric models often suffer from substantial measurement error. This measurement error can lead to seriously biased inferences about the effects of health conditions on the outcome measure of interest, and the bias generally spills...

In light of widespread concerns about the reliability of self-reported disability, we investigate what can be learned about the prevalence of work disability under various assumptions on the reporting error process. Developing a nonparametric bounding framework, we provide tight inferences under...

Variation in income tax policies and health insurance costs are shown to be theoretically appropriate instruments to identify endogenous firm wage and benefit offers in a labor supply model. Empirical results show that firms are more likely to provide health insurance benefits in states with...