There has been significant media attention on the issue of childhood obesity, leading policymakers to reform the … nutritional content maps into obesity outcomes, using panel data on a nationally representative cohort of children, tracking them … participation in the school lunch program leads to weight gain, as measured by changes in obesity, overweight, and BMI. These …

Smoking and obesity are the two leading causes of preventable deaths in the United States. Because smoking is subject … to heavy government intervention, understanding the effect of smoking on obesity is important in determining the extent …. Our preferred estimate suggests reduced smoking accounts for 6% of the concurrent rise in obesity …

This paper is the first to use the method of instrumental variables (IV) to estimate the impact of obesity on medical … weight as a natural experiment, yields estimates of the impact of obesity on medical costs that are considerably higher than … the correlations reported in the previous literature. For example, obesity is associated with $676 higher annual medical …

Obesity has been one of the fastest growing health concerns among children, particularly among disadvantaged children …. For children overall, obesity rates have tripled from 5% in the early 1970s to about 15% by the early 2000s. For … disadvantaged children, obesity rates are closer to 20%. In this paper, we first examine the impact of various measures of …