This study exploits plausibly exogenous variation from the youngest sibling's school eligibility to estimate the effects of parental work on the weight outcomes of older children in the household. Data come from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth linked to the Child and...

This paper investigates the underlying causes of suicide. In contrast to previous literature, we use data from the United States at the county level. Our primary methodology is a two-level Bayesian hierarchical model with spatially correlated random effects. Our results show that the significant...

Participation in social programs is often misreported in survey data, complicating the estimation of the effects of those programs. In this paper we propose a model to estimate treatment effect under endogenous participation and endogenous misreporting. We show that failure to account for...

In this paper, we propose a Bayesian factor analysis model with the purpose of serving as an alternate approach to calculating the UNDP's Human Development Index, as well as providing a general methodology which can be used to augment existing indices or build new ones. In addition to addressing...

Administrative data are considered the “gold standard” when measuring program participation, but little evidence exists on the potential problems with administrative records or their implications for econometric estimates. We explore issues with administrative data using the FoodAPS, a...

We study the effects of urban environment on childhood obesity by concentrating on the effects of walking trails and crime close to children’s homes on their BMI and obesity status. We use a unique dataset, which combines information on recreational trails in Indianapolis with data on violent...

In this paper, we expand on the seminal work of Altonji and Shakotko (1987) and Topel (1991) and reinvestigate the returns to seniority in the U.S. We begin with the same wage equation as in previous studies. We extend the model of Hyslop (1999) and explicitly model the participation/employment...

While childhood obesity has become a significant public health concern over the last few decades, knowledge concerning the origins of or persistence in childhood anthropometric measures is incomplete. Here, we utilize several nonparametric measures of mobility to assess the evolution of weight,...

This paper aims to identify the causal effect of smoking on body weight using data from the Lung Health Study, a randomized trial of smoking cessation treatments. We find evidence that quitting smoking leads to an average long-run weight gain of around 11-12 pounds, and that the drop in smoking...

We propose a Bayesian factor analysis model to rank the health of localities. Mortality and morbidity variables empirically contribute to the resulting rank, and population and spatial correlation are incorporated into a measure of uncertainty. We use county-level data from Texas and Wisconsin...