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Journal Article
Economic perspectives on childhood obesity
Obesity rates in the U.S. have skyrocketed in the last 30 years. Among adults, obesity rates more than doubled from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. Children obesity rates nearly tripled over the same period. This article discusses why obesity is of interest from an economic perspective. It them examines changes in children's lives, particularly the increase in maternal employment, that may have contributed to increases in children's weight.
Working Paper
Maternal employment and overweight children
This paper seeks to determine whether a causal relationship exists between maternal employment and childhood overweight. We use matched mother/child data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and employ econometric techniques to control for observable and unobservable differences across individuals and families that may influence both children's weight and their mothers' work patterns. Our results indicate that a child is more likely to be overweight if his/her mother worked more hours per week over the child's life. Analyses by subgroups show that it is higher socioeconomic status ...
Working Paper
Reading, writing, and raisinets: are school finances contributing to children’s obesity?
The proportion of adolescents in the United States who are obese has nearly tripled over the last two decades. At the same time, schools, often citing financial pressures, have given students greater access to ?junk? foods and soda pop, using proceeds from these sales to fund school programs. We examine whether schools under financial pressure are more likely to adopt potentially unhealthful food policies. Next, we examine whether students? Body Mass Index (BMI) is higher in counties where a greater proportion of schools are predicted to allow these food policies. Because the financial ...