The high and rapidly rising adult obesity rates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand are associated with major health risks, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, stroke, and some forms of cancer; large health care costs; and premature deaths annually. For...

Health, like schooling, is a form of human capital and can be expected to be positively related to labor productivity and labor supply. The production of good health and labor productivity, however, sometimes competes with an individual's lifestyle, e.g., binge drinking. In this study, an...

A calibrated model is used to determine the welfare impacts of various regulatory instruments for improving health. The results of a lab experiment are integrated in a partial equilibrium model representing demands for two kinds of fish, one with higher nutritional benefits (canned sardines) and...

Given the credence nature of functional food attributes labelling plays a key role inallowing consumers to make informed choices about foods with enhanced health attributes.The degree to which a particular jurisdiction permits health claims for food products and the type of allowable health...

Simple plots of data show that malaria has a negative correlation with national income per capita, whether looking across countries at a point in time, or looking at a single country over time. Some countries have been able to move from an equilibrium characterized by low income and high...

Wildfire seasons are becoming longer and more intense throughout the world, making it increasingly important to monetize the full damages caused by wildfires when analyzing various fire management policies. We estimate the economic costs of the health effects associated with exposure to wildfire...

School feeding program as a social safety net has been popular in developing countries as an instrument for achieving the Millennium Development Goals. These programs are frequently targeted towards populations that are food insecure and reside in areas with high concentrations of families from...

A model of expected utility maximization and a stochastic health production function are used to show how consumer's beliefs, the certainty of beliefs, and the presence of information affects demand for goods as they are driven by the demand for health. Then, it is shown that competitive markets...

In this paper, we describe individual food consumption decisions as driven by a utility effect and a food environment effect. To outline the utility effect, we first develop a new theoretical model of individual food consumption. Next, we introduce the food environment effect by showing how the...

In modern societies consumers often face a trade-off between health and taste, the latter which encourages consumption of fatty, salty and sweet foods, whereas health awareness discourages consumption of the same food. The resulting diet, often rich in calories, sweeteners and fat constitutes a...