Existing studies on the economic impact of wildfire smoke have focused either on single fire events or entire fire seasons without distinguishing between individual occurrences. Neither approach allows for an examination of the marginal effects of fire attributes, such as distance and fuel type,...

This essay investigates the impacts of primary care giver’s (PCG) time allocation and food expenditure choices on childhood obesity using national panel study of income dynamic (PSID) data. A triangular system of equations is derived and estimated under parametric and semi-parametric model...

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

More than one billion adults are overweight worldwide, and more than 300 million of them clinically obese, raising the risk of many serious diseases. Only 3.6 percent of Japanese have a body mass index (BMI) over 30, which is the international standard for obesity, whereas 32.0 percent of...

Efficiency measurement has been one of the most extensively explored areas of health services research over the past two decades. Despite this attention, few studies have examined whether a provider’s efficiency varies on a monthly, quarterly or other, sub-annual basis. This paper presents an...

Obesity problems are no longer limited to the USA as, in recent years, obesity rates in the EU countrieshave increased dramatically, leading to serious consequences in terms of direct health care costs and productivitylosses, and indicating the existence of a negative externality connected with...

The US Food and Drug Administration confirmed in February 2007 that a major foodborne illness outbreak was caused by two peanut butter brands, Peter Pan and Great Value, manufactured by ConAgra Foods Inc. at its Sylvester, Georgia, processing plant. As a result, on February 14, 2007, ConAgra...

The current obesity crisis in the United States is generating numerous alternative policy options for combating the problem. One alternative that has been widely proposed is an excise or sales tax on sugar-sweetened non-alcoholic beverages. This literature started out within a very simple...

O uso dos produtos à base de plantas medicinais surge como uma forte tendência mundial. Esse é considerado um mercado promissor e apresenta números expressivos, tornando-se um ambiente de negócio atrativo. Entretanto, apesar de toda importância social e econômica, o Brasil e o Paraná...

This paper presents a model of estimated demand for four tobacco products: cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco, and smoking tobacco products. Own elasticities and cross-price elasticities are used to obtain insights into the effectiveness and implications of new policy measures. Of particular...