Obesity is associated with serious health problems, and it can generate adverse economic outcomes. We analyze a nationally-representative sample of young American adults to investigate the interplay between obesity, wages and self-esteem. Wages can be impacted directly by obesity, and they can...

The total value of life lost due to death because of waiting for an organ transplant is greater than $4 billion annually in the United States, and the excess demand for organs has been increasing over time. To shed light on the factors that impact the willingness to donate an organ, we analyze...

This paper uses a rich employer-employee matched data set to investigate the existence and the extent of nonprofit and part-time wage and compensation differentials in child care. The empirical strategy adjusts for workers' self-selection into the for-profit or nonprofit sectors, into full-time...

Using data from three waves of Add Health we find that being very attractive reduces a young adult's (ages 18-26) propensity for criminal activity and being unattractive increases it for a number of crimes, ranging from burglary to selling drugs. A variety of tests demonstrate that this result...

Although there is a sizeable literature on the effect of private school attendance on academic student outcomes, the number of studies that investigate the impact of school sector on non-academic outcomes is limited. Using a rich data set, we analyze the impact of Catholic school attendance on...

This is the first paper to investigate the determinants of the demand for medical care in the People's Republic of China. It uses a data set that consists of detailed characteristics of 6407 urban households, a continuous measure of health care spending, and price. A two-part model and a...

Using a nationally-representative panel data set of U.S. high school students (AddHealth data) that contains a relatively large sample of siblings and twins, the paper investigates the impacts of gun availability at home and individual drug use on robbery, burglary, theft and damaging property...

Physicians' advice to stop smoking has been found to increase smoking cessation rates in controlled clinical trials. However, these finding may not be applicable under real world conditions. This paper investigates the impact of physicians' advice and tobacco control policies on conditional...

This report summarizes the results of a project which investigated the time series interrelationships between crime, drug use, police, and arrests in New York City. We use monthly data from 1970 through 1990 for New York City. We plot the individual time series for five different non-drug...

The relationship between unemployment and health continues to absorb social scientists. The primary reason is the potential significance of an association. If a substantial deterioration in aggregate health is related to economic downturns, then the cost of a recession may be much greater than...