We examine the effects of fast-food restaurant advertising on television on the body composition of adolescents as measured by percentage body fat (PBF) and to assess the sensitivity of these effects to using conventional measures of youth obesity based on body-mass index (BMI). We merge...

This paper aims at opening the black box of peer effects in adolescent weight gain. Using Add Health data on secondary schools in the U.S., we investigate whether these partly flow through the eating habits channel. Adolescents are assumed to interact through a friendship social network. We...

Time scarcity is one of the strongest correlates of fast food consumption. To estimate the causal effect of time lost on food choice, we match daily store-specific foot traffic data traced via smartphones to plausibly exogenous shocks in highway traffic data in Los Angeles. We find that on days...

We use price and wage data from McDonald's restaurants to provide evidence on wage increases, labor-saving technology introduction, and price pass-through by a large low-wage employer facing a flurry of minimum wage hikes from 2016-2020. We estimate an elasticity of hourly wage rates with...

This paper examines the effects of alcohol consumption on employment and wages for males and females in Russia. Both cross sectional and fixed-effects models are estimated utilizing data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey. The results from the models that do not control for...

To date, 16 states have passed medical marijuana laws, yet very little is known about their effects. Using state-level data, we examine the relationship between medical marijuana laws and a variety of outcomes. Legalization of medical marijuana is associated with increased use of marijuana among...

We provide new evidence on the extent to which the demand for cigarettes is derived from the demand for weight control (i.e. weight loss or avoidance of weight gain). We utilize nationally representative data that provide the most direct evidence to date on this question: individuals are...

No previous study has attempted to estimate the effect of intrauterine exposure to armed conflict, a potential source of stress, on pregnancy outcomes. Drawing on data from the 2004 Palestinian Demographic and Health Survey, we examine the relationship between fatalities caused by Israeli...

Argentina hit headlines around the world in 2002 on account of the largest debt default in history and a sudden economic collapse that generated statistics reminiscent of those from the Great Depression. In this article we focus on other consequences of the crisis that are not so obvious but...

This is the first paper using household survey data from two countries involved in an international war (Eritrea and Ethiopia) to measure the conflict's impact on children's health in both nations. The identification strategy uses event data to exploit exogenous variation in the conflict's...