We propose a novel Bayesian Graded Response Model (BGRM) for food security measurement. Our BGRM has several attractive features. It produces continuous food security estimates and measures of estimation uncertainty at the household level. Unlike the USDA's official measurement model, the BGRM...

Previous research generally finds that obesity negatively affects wages for women and does not affect wages for men. But this literature has for the most part focused on young workers and has not examined whether the effect of obesity might change as people age. In this essay, I examine the...

The literature examining the relationship between body mass index (BMI) and wages has fairly consistently found that BMI has a negative impact on earnings for women, and less (if any) consequences for men. In this paper, we relax the assumption -- largely unquestioned in this research -- that...

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) cost Americans billions of dollars per year. High cholesterol levels, which are closely related to dietary habits, are a major contributor to CVD. In this article, we study whether changes in food prices are related to cholesterol levels and whether taxes or...

In this study, we examine the effect of SNAP on health quite generally, examining self-assessed health (SAH), healthy time, and basic health utilization measures as outcomes. Our approach is to model outcomes and participation simultaneously, using exogenous variation in state eligibility to...

In this paper, we estimate the effect of food prices on food insecurity for SNAP recipients using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the recently published Quarterly Food-At-Home Price Database (QFAHPD). By constructing this sample we can directly measure the relationship between...