The effects of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on obesity have been the focus of much debate. However, causal interpretation of estimates from previous studies, comparing participants to non-participants, is complicated by endogeneity and possible misreporting of...

We propose a Bayesian factor analysis model to rank the health of localities. Mortality and morbidity variables empirically contribute to the resulting rank, and population and spatial correlation are incorporated into a measure of uncertainty. We use county-level data from Texas and Wisconsin...

Rates of childhood obesity have increased dramatically in the last few decades. Non-causal evidence suggests that childhood obesity is highly persistent over the life cycle. However little is known about the origins of this persistence. In this paper we attempt to answer three questions. First,...

This study exploits plausibly exogenous variation from the youngest sibling's school eligibility to estimate the effects of parental work on the weight outcomes of older children in the household. Data come from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth linked to the Child and...

Administrative data are considered the "gold standard" when measuring program participation, but little evidence exists on the potential problems with administrative records or their implications for econometric estimates. We explore issues with administrative data using the FoodAPS, a unique...

Participation in social programs is often misreported in survey data, complicating the estimation of the effects of those programs. In this paper, we propose a model to estimate treatment effects under endogenous participation and endogenous misreporting. We show that failure to account for...

We characterize the bias of propensity score based estimators of common average treatment effect parameters in the case of selection on unobservables. We then propose a new minimum biased estimator of the average treatment effect. We assess the finite sample performance of our estimator using...

In light of the recent rise in childhood obesity, the School Breakfast Program (SBP) and National School Lunch Program (NSLP) have received renewed attention. Using panel data on over 13,500 primary school students, we assess the relationship between SBP and NSLP participation and (relatively)...