Download or read book Essays in Food and Health Economics written by Kara Renee Grant and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three independent and mostly interrelated studies that focus on consumer behavior in the areas of food and healthcare. In my first paper, my coauthors and I analyze consumers' willingness to pay and preferences for reduced food waste and increased shelf life in relation to refrigerated ready-to-eat meals. We find evidence to suggest that consumers are willing to pay for reduced food waste, but willingness to pay for increased shelf life depends on the group being considered. The groups can be separated into health-conscious and on-the-go shoppers where only the on-the-go shopper is willing to pay a premium for a product with an increased shelf life. My second paper elicits consumers' willingness to pay for a clean label and a novel microwave technology. The results suggest that consumers are willing to pay for a clean label and the magnitude varies by group. There are also groups who are willing to pay a premium for the novel technology, but it is not homogeneous among groups. In my third paper, my coauthor and I present a theoretical model of health care consumption in emergency departments and in outpatient settings as functions of patients' time, market price of health care, and health insurance coverage. Applying our theory to data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), we examine the relationship between health care utilization and health insurance coverage. From the interaction between the price effect and the network effect we find that an insured individual in a rural area has a lower likelihood of a checkup within the last year compared to an insured individual in an urban area.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Food and Health Behavior written by Elizbeth Robison Botkins and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years the `farm to table' trend, the idea of understanding linkages between agricultural supply, food systems, and the food that is consumed, has been growing in popularity. This dissertation takes this idea a step further and examines topics on the progression from `farm to health outcomes.' It is important to recognize not only that food systems impact the way consumers eat, but that those food choices impact health outcomes and the way that medical care is consumed. The three essays of this dissertation examine three separate points along this continuum to improve the understanding of how food systems, food choice, health outcomes, and healthcare consumption interact. The first essay evaluates factors associated with school districts' decisions to participate in farm to school (FTS) programs. I leverage the USDA's Farm to School Census to analyze factors associated with FTS participation, the types of FTS activities implemented, and the challenges faced by participating school districts. I use spatially articulate data to estimate the spatial spillover effects of FTS participation. The results demonstrate that both school characteristics and local farm production factors are associated with FTS participation. The estimated spatial spillover effect is positive, suggesting that areas with a high penetration of FTS activities have lower barriers associated with implementing FTS programs. In my second essay, I shift to evaluating how parent-child pairs make the daily school lunch decision. Meals served in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) are on average more healthful than alternatives, implying that increasing participation in the NSLP can improve nutrition for a large number of children. However, there is little understanding of the household decision process that determines participation in the NSLP. This study uses a parent-child choice experiment to assess the impact of both parent and child on NSLP participation. The results show that both have a significant impact on the chosen meal, where parents are concerned with meal palatability and nutrition, while the child only cares about palatability. The decision is also influenced by the household structure and demographics, and the inclusion of local foods in the school lunch option. My final essay evaluates how access to medical care can impact lifestyle choices. I evaluate if there is an ex ante moral hazard effect in health insurance markets. Ex ante moral hazard occurs when an individual takes on more risk knowing they will not bear the full cost of the consequences. In the case of health insurance, this could mean taking on unhealthful eating habits knowing that if these habits lead to illness the cost of care will be covered by insurance. Using panel data from the National Longitudinal Youth Survey 1997, I find evidence of an ex ante moral hazard effect in BMI, binge drinking, and smoking, suggesting that people take on less healthful behaviors, holding all else constant, when they have health insurance. The existence of ex ante moral hazard suggests that insurance companies can seek efficiency gains by finding ways to structure policies that diminish this moral hazard effect.

Download or read book Three Essays in Health Economics written by Christina Ann Robinson and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Keywords: retiree health insurance, obesity, overweight, Food Stamp Program.

Download or read book The Economics of Sustainable Food written by Nicoletta Batini and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Economics of Sustainable Food details the true cost of food for people and the planet. It illustrates how to transform our broken system, alleviating its severe financial and human burden. The key is smart macroeconomic policy that moves us toward methods that protect the environment like regenerative land and sea farming, low-impact urban farming, and alternative protein farming, and toward healthy diets. The book's multidisciplinary team of authors lay out detailed fiscal and trade policies, as well as structural reforms, to achieve those goals. Chapters discuss strategies to make food production sustainable, nutritious, and fair, ranging from taxes and spending to education, labor market, health care, and pension reforms, alongside regulation in cases where market incentives are unlikely to work or to work fast enough. The authors carefully consider the different needs of more and less advanced economies, balancing economic development and sustainability goals. Case studies showcase successful strategies from around the world, such as taxing foods with a high carbon footprint, financing ecosystems mapping and conservation to meet scientific targets for healthy biomes permanency, subsidizing sustainable land and sea farming, reforming health systems to move away from sick care to preventive, nutrition-based care, and providing schools with matching funds to purchase local organic produce.--Amazon.

Download or read book Three Essays in Health Economics written by Stephen Ransom Barnes and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Health Economics written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines topics in health economics. The first study examines the relationship between access to retiree health insurance (RHI) and the decision to leave oneÃØâ'Ơâ"Øs career job. In this paper a Cox Proportional Hazard Model with time varying covariates is utilized to estimate the probability that an individual disengages from their career job, given they have not yet done so. Results indicate that those with access to RHI are significantly more likely to leave their career employer in all time periods than identical individuals without RHI. The second examines the relationship between a householdÃØâ'Ơâ"Øs Food Stamp Program participation, and child overweight and obesity. This paper considers a dynamic process for weight gainÃØâ'Ơ†explicitly modeling the role last periodÃØâ'Ơâ"Øs weight plays in determining this periodÃØâ'Ơâ"Øs weight. Results suggest that FSP participation does not significantly affect the deviation of a childÃØâ'Ơâ"Øs current BMI from the ideal level, indicating that FSP participation does not contribute to child overweight. The results also suggest that children tend toward their medically ideal weight. The third essay considers a related issue. There is a wide body of literature that examines the effect of FSP participation on obesity outcomes for adults and a smaller body of work that examines the same relationship for children. The literature focusing on adults finds that FSP participation is positively related to obesity in women, while work focusing on children fails to find a similar effect. This creates an interesting economic puzzle as most children live in the same household as their mother, and as such, the foods they consume and the effect of that food on their weight are expected to be similar. This paper directly addresses this puzzle, and examines the relationship between a motherÃØâ'Ơâ"Øs Food Stamp Program (FSP) participation, and obesity. Empirical results suggest that motherÃØâ'Ơâ"Øs are less likely to becom.

Download or read book Two Essays in Food Economics written by Yawotse Nouve and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economic and physical access to healthy and nutritious foods have been targets of public policies worldwide. While the policy emphasis may differ depending on the country, the end goal is to achieve food security for all. This thesis, organized in two essays, is an attempt to contribute to understanding the factors affecting the access to healthy foods and their implications for the households' food security. The first essay focuses on the issues contributing to rising food prices. The research uses time series analysis of monthly food prices in Togo over the period 1998 to 2017 to determine first, the levels of unconditional and conditional volatility in major food commodity prices, and then, the drivers of those price changes. The results reveal that fluctuations in food prices, as measured by volatilities, has increased in the last ten years. In addition, the results of Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) and Error Correction Models (ECM) estimations indicate that the observed price variabilities of food commodities in Togo may depend on the agricultural production seasonality and domestic fuel price. The findings suggest that any policies that stabilize the domestic fuel price and that address the seasonality of the agricultural markets will most likely contribute to stabilizing the market prices of food commodities. The second essay focuses on healthy diet issues. The study is an empirical analysis to identify potential determinants of healthy food consumption in the United States using the USDA ERS Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS) data on households' food acquisitions and health. Two diet quality indices, the Healthy Eating Index (HEI) score and the primary food shopper assessment of households' diet are used in the analysis. The results suggest that food shopping at superstores and supermarkets, higher income, eating home cooked meals more frequently, and a higher education level are associated with a healthier diet quality. Conversely, the distance from the nearest food store may adversely affect households' diet quality. The implications of the study are that improving economic as well as geographic access to healthy food stores and promoting nutrition education in the United States are likely to promote healthier diets.

Download or read book Three Essays in Health Economics written by Huilin Zhu and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays in health economics. The first chapter, "The Built Environment and Obesity in Philadelphia: The Use of Satellite Imagery and Transfer Learning," investigates the relationship between the built environment and health outcomes, specifically obesity prevalence in Philadelphia. The built environment can affect obesity prevalence through the physical activity environment and the food environment. The main innovation of this paper is to use a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract data representing the features of the built environment from high-resolution satellite imagery. Because of the lack of information on the food environment in satellite images, I combined a proxy variable for food access together with the feature variables to represent the characteristics of the built environment. I then employed the Elastic Net model to test the relationship between the feature variables of the built environment and obesity prevalence in Philadelphia. The results show that the built environment is highly associated with obesity prevalence. This study also provides some evidence that the features of the built environment that have been extracted from satellite imagery can reduce the role of food access in estimating obesity, as well as that adding these features can explain more variance of obesity. The second chapter, "Paid Maternity Leave and Child Health: Evidence from Urban China," uses the China Health and Nutrition Survey data to study whether the extension of paid maternity leave affects children's health outcomes in urban China. This paper uses the time variation of the implementation of a maternity leave policy across different provinces from 1987 to 1991 in China to estimate a two-way fixed-effects model. The results suggest that the expansion of paid maternity leave has no impact on children's health in urban China. The last chapter, titled "The Association between Paid Maternity Leave and Mothers' Health and Labor Outcomes in Urban China," studies whether the extension of paid maternity leave in 1987-1991 would affect the labor and health outcomes of mothers in urban China by using the China Health and Nutrition Survey data. Based on the variation in the implementation time of a paid maternity leave policy across different provinces, this paper employs a two-way fixed-effects model to estimate the policy impact on mothers' health and labor outcomes in China. The findings indicate that extending the duration of paid maternity leave is associated with an increased likelihood of mothers remaining employed after childbirth. However, the study also reveals a negative relationship between the extension of paid maternity leave and mothers' wage rates.

Download or read book Three Essays in Health and Nutrition Economics written by Matthew P. Rabbitt and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This dissertation focuses on aspects of behavior and public policy related to vulnerable populations. The first essay, coauthored with Christian Gregory and David C. Ribar, reviews recent theory and empirical evidence regarding the effect of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participation on food insecurity and replicates the modelling strategies used in the empirical literature. We find that recent evidence suggesting the ameliorative effect of SNAP on food insecurity may not be robust to specification choice or data. Most specifications mirror the existing literature in finding a positive association of food insecurity with SNAP participation. Two-stage least squares and control function methods do show that SNAP reduces food insecurity, but effects are not consistent across sub-populations and are not always statistically significant. In the second essay, I examine the relationship between SNAP participation and food insecurity using data from the 2001-2008 Current Population Survey (CPS-FSS). A behavioral Rasch selection model is proposed and estimated using four subsamples of low-income households: unmarried parent households, married parent households, all-elderly households, and other adult-only households. The behavioral Rasch selection model assumes responses to multiple food hardship questions may be modelled as indicators of a single underlying index of food hardships, and concurrently, controls for the endogeneity of program participation. Simultaneously modelling the outcomes this way leads to more efficient estimation. The models are identified using exogenous changes in state-level polices related to SNAP. The results suggest that SNAP has a strong ameliorative effect on food insecurity for married parent households, all-elderly households, and other adult-only households, while SNAP continues to be associated with greater food hardships for unmarried parent households. Participating in SNAP reduces the probability of food insecurity by 22.4% for other adult-only households, 18% for all-elderly households, and 17% for married parent households. The third and final essay examines the relationship between underage college drinking and the initial occupational choices of male college graduates using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97). Focusing on recent college graduates and their initial occupational choices allows me to address important timing issues not considered by the existing literature. For the multivariate analyses, I estimate multinomial logistic models of occupational choice, where the occupational choice set is specified as employed full-time in white collar occupations, other occupations, enrolled in school, and neither in school nor employed full-time. In addition, I estimate multinomial logistic selection models that control for the potential endogeneity of underage drinking. The results suggest underage college drinking is not associated with young men's initial occupational choices, with the exception of the decision to be enrolled in school. Young men with any underage college days where they drank two or more drinks are 28.9% less likely to be enrolled in school after completing a bachelor's degree."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Food Health and Consumer Behavior written by Thadchaigeni Panchalingam and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: However, while parent and student preferences align on some aspects of locally sourced meal elements, their preferences are not identical, with parents displaying a higher willingness to pay for locally sourced vegetables and students displaying a higher willingness to pay for locally sourced fruit. Joint choices are influenced by both parties. Parents dominate the joint outcomes when the household income is lower, when students eat school lunch more frequently and in dyads featuring a female parent and female student compared to male parent-male student dyads. These findings may hold implications for efforts to promote locally sourced food elements in school lunches and the role of parent engagement in that process. In the third essay, I investigate what characteristics of households, if any, that predict purchase of portion-controlled sizes of full calorie carbonated beverages (i.e., soda sold in less than 12 oz containers) and whether this behavior is associated with other healthy dietary habits. I find that household demographics including income, education, and presence of children or elderly are not associated with the purchasing behavior of full calorie carbonated beverages that are less than 12 oz. However, this behavior is negatively associated with the share of carbonated beverages that are diet and positively associated with the share of food expenditure dedicated to fresh produce, which are proxies used to capture healthy dietary habits. Overall, the findings suggest that there is an association between purchases of less than 12 oz of regular carbonated beverages (i.e., the portion-controlled sizes) and portion control behavior.

Download or read book Three Essays in Public Economics written by Thomas Mathiasen Selden and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Global Food Global Justice written by Mary C. Rawlinson and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-09-10 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Brillant-Savarin remarked in 1825 in his classic text Physiologie du Goût, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.” Philosophers and political theorists have only recently begun to pay attention to food as a critical domain of human activity and social justice. Too often these discussions treat food as a commodity and eating as a matter of individual choice. Policies that address the global obesity crisis by focusing on individual responsibility and medical interventions ignore the dependency of human agency on a culture of possibilities. The essays collected here address this lack in philosophy and political theory by appreciating food as an origin of human culture and a network of social relations. They show how an approach to the current global obesity epidemic through individual choice deflects the structural change that is necessary to create a culture of healthy eating. Analyzing the contemporary food crises of obesity, malnutrition, environmental degradation, and cultural displacement as global issues of public policy and social justice, these essays display the essential interconnections among issues of social inequity, animal rights, environmental ethics, and cultural identity. They call for new solidarities and new public policies to ensure the sustainable practices necessary to the production and distribution of wholesome and satisfying food. Lévi-Strauss located the origin of ethics in table manners. By learning what and how to eat, humans learned respect for others, for the earth, and for the other forms of life that sustain human existence. Lévi-Strauss fears that in our time this “lesson in humility” coursing throughout the mythologies of “savage peoples” may have been forgotten, so that the world is treated as a thing to be appropriated and the extinction of species and cultures as an inevitable result of the ascendancy of global capital. This volume makes clear the need to change the way we eat, if we are to live on the earth together with what Lévi-Strauss calls “decency and discretion.”

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Food Safety Emerging Issues from the Consumer s and Food Industry s Perspective written by and published by Cuvillier Verlag. This book was released on 2007-04-10 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Positive Economics written by Milton Friedman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1953 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper is concerned primarily with certain methodological problems that arise in constructing the "distinct positive science" that John Neville Keynes called for, in particular, the problem how to decide whether a suggested hypothesis or theory should be tentatively accepted as part of the "body of systematized knowledge concerning what is."

Download or read book Essays in Health Economics and Labor Economics written by Ming Gu and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter I: The Impact of Occupation on Health Participation in meaningful occupations contributes to good health and well-being. Workers are more likely to derive satisfaction from participating in occupations well-suited to their skills and training. This project provides causal evidence of the impact of occupation on health among college graduates. In particular, I estimate the health effect of participation in occupations well-suited to their education level, that is, occupations that value college education. Valuation of college education in an occupation is measured by occupation-specific college earning premium: the adjusted percentage difference in earnings between workers with and without college degrees in this given occupation. The causal inference relies on estimation with instrumental variables, which are constructed in the spirit of Hausman's price instrumental variables. The result suggests that college educated individuals participating in occupations with higher college earning premiums have better self-reported health, even after accounting for income, occupational prestige, and within-occupation hierarchy. This is the first paper to establish the causal impact of occupation on health. I also show that this causal impact remains significant across various specifications. Chapter II: The Power of Propaganda Since the 1950s, China's central government's gender equality propaganda is widely accepted as the explanation for China's high female labor force participation rate. In an effort to provide empirical evidence for this viewpoint, this project shows that early exposure to propaganda promoting gender equality affects individuals' attitudes towards women in the workforce. We gauge variation in the political climate between 1952 and 2008 by using the official newspaper of the central government, People's Daily, which has been under the direct control of the Chinese Communist Party's top leadership. For causal inference, we exploit provincial variation in propaganda intensities, proxied by provincial level radio and television signal coverage. In addition, we use the timing of exogenous events to generate an instrumental variable for intensity peaks of the gender-equality propaganda. First, we exploit the exogenous timing of a series of national and international Women's Conference as one set of instrumental variables. Second, we utilize the timing of Jiang Qing's (Mao's wife) coming into prominence and her sudden removal by a political coup towards the end of the Cultural Revolution. We find that women with more intense exposure to propaganda promoting gender equality before age 26, and men with more intense exposure before age 18 tend to endorse women's participation in the workforce. The effect of propaganda is more pronounced on women than men. It is worth noting that while propaganda encourages women's participation in the workforce, it does not emphasize men's responsibility in the household. We indeed find evidence of the "superwoman complex": women are expected to strive for a career and do the bulk of the housework. This further evidence suggests that propaganda is able to transmit a more nuanced message, rather than a singularly progressive one. This is the first paper to empirically establish the long-term effect of early exposure to propaganda on individual's preference formation. Chapter III: Do Food Stamps Need More Restrictions? Given the high prevalence of obesity in low income population, several times in the history of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Congress has considered placing limits on the types of food that could be purchased with program benefits. This study provides empirical evidence on the effectiveness of such potential restriction by examining the impact of income on calorie consumption patterns. The intuition is that if limited budget is the main reason why low-income households choose calorie dense food items, then subsidy without any restriction, acting as an upward shift in income, would reduce the likelihood of obesity. Using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data from 2007-2014, I compare individuals from households who were recently dropped from SNAP, most likely due to a positive income shock, to individuals who are still participating in the program. I find little income effect on calorie consumption patterns. Whereas reduced grocery store accessibility is significantly correlated with an increase in total calorie intake, and calorie intake from sugar and fat. The result of this study suggests that placing limits on the types of food that could be purchased would be effective in curbing the obesity pandemic in low income population, and it also confirms the importance of eliminating food deserts.

Download or read book Essays on Health Economics and Health Behaviors written by Daniel Sebastian Tello-Trillo and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Men s Health Big Book of Food Nutrition written by Joel Weber and published by Rodale. This book was released on 2010-12-21 with total page 645 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An all-encompassing guide to transforming the body in a minimum of time demystifies contradictory dietary guidelines while making recommendations for informed shopping, eating and cooking. Original.