This paper is based on an ongoing joint work with David Sahn and Xiaobo Zhang.

The economic benefits from improving health status are obvious, yet there remains a lack of agreement on how to quantify and compare the benefits and the accompanied costs. In our study, we extend Liu et al. (2008)’s study on the role of health status on income in China and examine whether...

Introduction: As folate deficiency is mainly caused by the dependency on folate-poor staple crops, such as rice, the implementation of rice with a high level of natural folate could be a successful pro-rural and pro-poor intervention strategy to reduce folate deficiencies in China, where about...

This article questions the assumption of symmetric consumption behavior in the conventional analysis of intra-household calorie allocation. It proposes a framework that takes into account asymmetric consumption behavior due to liquidity constraints or loss aversion. Using panel data from China,...

This study attempts to evaluate the economic benefits of the country of origin labeling (COOL) in Taiwan. A Vickrey second-price sealed-bid auction was conducted to estimate the consumer’s willingness to pay for Taiwan products vs. those from China and Vietnam. Our experiment was designed to...

This paper is based on an ongoing joint work with David Sahn and Xiaobo Zhang.

Problems of overweight and obesity among children have increased in China and pose a problem both for individuals as well as for public social and health care systems. This study explores factors contributing to weight problems among children age 6 to 18 years old in urban China. Data come from...

We investigate the relationship between changes in socioeconomic factors and the emerging coexistence of under and overweight among adults in China during 1991-2000. Our key questions are: (1) whether any socioeconomic factor explains both increasing overweight (Body Mass Index (BMI)less than or...

Chinese have been experiencing dramatic changes in their body weight in the last ten years. Food service sector is believed to have significant effect on the rise of obesity in China. This paper analyses Body Mass Index (BMI) and overweight issue of adults 18 years and above in urban China with...