The most recent figures show that 16 percent of children aged 6-11 are obese – almost twice the rate of overweight in the early 1980s. Although there are few straightforward policy tools to combat the high level of obesity, almost two thirds of school children eat a National School Lunch...

This paper analyzes the forces contributing to the worldwide long-run rise in obesity and the role of public interventions in affecting its continued growth. The cause of a growth in obesity in a population must be that calorie consumption is outpacing the growth of physical activity. Yet in...

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical examination of the long-run growth in weight over time. We argue that technological change has induced weight growth by making home- and market-production more sedentary and by lowering food prices through agricultural innovation. We consider how...

I use changes in immigrant eligibility for food stamps under the 1996 federal law and heterogeneous state responses to set up a natural experiment research design to study the effect of food stamps on Body Mass Index (BMI) of adults in immigrant families. I find that in the post-1996 period food...