This note's aim is to investigate the sensitivity of Christakis and Fowler's claim (NEJM July 26, 2007) that obesity has spread through social networks. It is well known in the economics literature that failure to include contextual effects can lead to spurious inference on social network...

BackgroundCurrent methods used in medical literatures to estimate social network effects of health outcomes may be biased to find these effects, even if none actually exist. ObjectiveTo investigate whether we detect network effects for health outcomes that are unlikely to be subject to network...

A growing literature in economics and other disciplines has tied exposure to early health shocks, particularly in utero influenza, to reductions in a variety of socioeconomic and health outcomes over the life course. However, no current evidence exists that examines this health shock on...

Despite increasing calls for value-based payments, existing methodologies for determining physicians' "value added" to patient health outcomes have important limitations. We incorporate methods from the value added literature in education research into a health care setting to present the first...

This paper examines the demographic pattern of friendship links among youth and the impact of those patterns on own educational outcomes using the friendship network data in the Add Health. We develop and estimate a reduced form matching model to predict friendship link formation and identify...

This paper estimates the effects of friends' health behaviors, smoking and drinking, on own health behaviors for adolescents while controlling for the effects of correlated unobservables between those friends. Specifically, the effect of friends' health behaviors is identified by comparing...

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this study examines the impact of high school cohort composition on the educational and labor market outcomes of individuals during their early 20s and again during their late 20s and early 30s. We find that having more high...

An important paper by Chiappori et al. (2012) has proposed an elegant and parsimonious model of spousal matching over multi-dimensional characteristics. Importantly, the model suggests specific testable assumptions that allow researchers to uncover marginal rates of substitution (MRS) between...

This note's aim is to investigate the sensitivity of Christakis and Fowler's claim [Christakis, N., Fowler, J., 2007. The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years. The New England Journal of Medicine 357, 370-379] that obesity has spread through social networks. It is well known...