This study uses county-level variation in implementation of calorie labeling laws in the US to identify the effects of such laws on body mass. Using the 2003 to 2012 waves of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, we find a statistically insignificant average treatment effect for women...

We study the effects of SNAP participation on food insecurity and food spending using finite mixture models that allow for a priori unspecified heterogeneous effects. We identify a low food security subgroup comprising a third of the population for whom SNAP participation increases the...

Violence is one of the leading social problems in the United States. The development of appropriate public policies to curtail violence is confounded by the relationship between alcohol and violence. In this paper, we estimate the propensity of alcohol control policies to reduce the perpetration...

We develop a semi-parametric latent class random effects multinomial logit model to distinguish between observed and unobserved household characteristics as determinants of child labor, school attendance and idleness. We find that much of the substitution between activities as a response to...

We use an econometric model of fertility and children’s activities to examine the causal effects of fertility on a child’s activities taking the endogeneity of fertility into account. Our specification is nonlinear and simultaneous and uses latent factors to allow for unobserved influences...

This paper develops and implements a GMM estimator for latent class models suitable for count data. The estimator uses conditional moment restrictions derived from standard count models. Both the efficient and consistent variants are considered. The implementation of optimal GMM based on...

This article examines the long term physical and mental health effects of internal migration. We use data from Italy that allows us to study a relatively unique migration experience from Southern and Northeastern regions of Italy to Northwestern ones and to the region around Rome concentrated...

In this paper, we examine the relationships between health care visits to general practitioners, public sector specialists and private sector specialists using data from Italy, which has a mixed public-private health care system. We develop a simultaneous equations model that allows for the...