We use data from the The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and from the Health and Retirement Study to explore how the the effect of individuals' genetic predisposition to higher BMI —measured by BMI polygenic scores— changes over the life-cycle for several cohorts....

This paper is the first to provide evidence that cultural attitudes towards gender equality affect behaviors with potentially devastating health consequences, and that they do so differently for male and female teenagers. In particular, we show that descending from more gender-equal societies...

This paper examines the consequences of rapid disinflation for downward wage rigidities in two emerging countries, Brazil and Uruguay, relying on high quality matched employer-employee administrative data. Downward nominal wage rigidities are more important in Uruguay, while wage indexation is...

En su influyente artículo, Guiso et al. (2008) descubrieron una relación positiva entre distintas medidas de igualdad de género y la brecha de género en matemáticas (que tiende a favorecer a los niños), explotando la variación de datos transversales de las puntuaciones en las pruebas de...

The authors provide comparable evidence on the patterns and trends in obesity across the Atlantic and analyze whether there are economic rationales for public intervention to control obesity. They take into account equity issues as well as efficiency considerations, which are organized around...

Using data from the US Health and Retirement Study, we study the causal effect of increased health insurance coverage through Medicare and the associated reduction in health-related background risk on financial risk-taking. Given the onset of Medicare at age 65, we identify our effect of...

This study evaluates whether the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which was signed into law in 1996, succeeded in mitigating job-lock, defined as reduced mobility out of jobs that offer health insurance. An analysis that uses quarterly data from the 1996 Survey of...

type="main" xml:lang="en" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>We use instrumental variable methods to investigate whether the impact of parental smoking habits on their children's smoking decisions is a causal one. We find suggestive evidence of same-sex role models in two-parent households: mothers play a more crucial...</p>

We present evidence on the frequency of nominal wage adjustment using SIPP data adjusted for measurement error. The SIPP is a representative sample of the US population. Our main results are: (i) The average quarterly probability of a nominal wage change is between 21.1 and 26.6 percent,...

We study the causal impact of the minimum wage on employment and welfare in Thailand using a difference-in-difference approach that relies on exogenous policy variation in minimum wages across provinces. We find that minimum-wage increases have small disemployment effects on female, elderly, and...