After a lifetime of working and saving, retirement is a time that an individual can participate in aspirations and activities that were difficult to explore under the constraints of family rearing and full time employment. This newfound freedom allows one to act on her true preferences and alter...

The School Breakfast Program (SBP) and National School Lunch Program (NSLP) are two federally assisted school meal programs that currently serve over 31.7 million children each day. Most of the existing literature examines the nutritional quality of school meals with a handful studying the...

This paper investigates the impact of Medicaid eligibility expansion set forth in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. The extension of Medicaid eligibility to 133% of the Federal Poverty level nationwide will impact labor force participation and welfare participation...

This paper analyzes if people use ignorance as an excuse to pursue immediate gratification, at the expense of future wellbeing, a behavior we label ‘strategic self-ignorance’. In a theoretical model we show that present-biased individuals benefit from choosing ignorance of the potentially...

Health disparities are abundantly recorded in literature, but is much less understood within a rural-urban context. In this paper, four major diseases in Virginia are studied: cancer, stroke, cardiovascular disease (heart disease) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Separate count...

Improvement in maternal health care is at the center stage of policy making for many developing countries including India, which is faced with a high maternal mortality rate of 540 deaths per 100,000 live births. In India, 36% of women are underweight and an important policy question is whether...

This study examined differences in technical efficiency between two groups of rural hospitals operating under different Medicare reimbursement systems: cost-based reimbursed Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs) and non-converting, prospectively paid (PPS) rural hospitals. To control for hospital...