Immigration is having an increasingly important effect on the social insurance system in the United States. On the one hand, eligible legal immigrants have the right to eventually receive pension benefits, but also rely on other aspects of the social insurance system such as health care,...

In order to explain the substantial recent increases in obesity rates in the United States, we consider the effect of falling food prices in the context of a model involving endogenous body weight norms and an explicit, empirically grounded description of human metabolism. Unlike previous...

Obesity is significantly more prevalent among non-Hispanic African-American (henceforth "black") women than among non]Hispanic white American (henceforth gwhiteh) women. These differences have persisted without much alteration since the early 1970s, despite substantial increases in the rates of...

Self-reported home values are widely used as a measure of housing wealth by researchers; the accuracy of this measure, however, is an open empirical question, and requires some type of market assessment of the values reported. In this study, the authors examine the predictive power of...

We test for differences across the two most recent NHANES survey periods (19881994 and 1999 2004) in self-perception of weight status. We find that the probability of self-classifying as overweight is significantly lower on average in the more recent survey, for both men and women, controlling...