The increase in the prevalence of obesity worldwide has led to great interest in the economic consequences of obesity …, but valid and powerful instruments for obesity, which are needed to estimate its causal effects, are rare. This paper …

In this paper, we examine the effect of suburbanization on obesity rates. Our study is an improvement over the existing … effect of highways on obesity rates within an MSA, particularly the suburbs versus the central city. To estimate the … relationship between obesity and highways, we will use county-level data on obesity rates from the Behavioral Risk Factor …

Rising prevalence of obesity among adults and children is a major policy issue in many countries. Two widely discussed … instruments to address obesity are a tax on unhealthy foods (fat tax) and a subsidy on healthy foods (thin subsidy). We compare … for healthy and unhealthy meals. We show that the policy which reduces obesity under the most general conditions is the …