Obesity has been one of the fastest growing health concerns among children, particularly among disadvantaged children. For children overall, obesity rates have tripled from 5% in the early 1970s to about 15% by the early 2000s. For disadvantaged children, obesity rates are closer to 20%. In this...

This paper investigates how accountability pressures under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) may affect children's rate of overweight. Schools facing increased pressures to produce academic outcomes may reallocate their efforts in ways that have unintended consequences for children's health. For...

In this paper, we investigate the impact of attending school on body weight and obesity. We use school starting age cutoff dates to compare weight outcomes for similar age children with different years of school exposure. As is the case with academic outcomes, school exposure is related to...

This paper investigates whether children are more or less likely to be overweight if their mothers work. The prevalence of both overweight children and working mothers has risen dramatically over the past few decades, although these parallel trends may be coincidental. The goal of this paper is...

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, using proceeds from the sales to fund school programs. We examine...

The recent experience of Washington State provides a natural setting to examine the effects of the unemployment insurance payroll tax on wages, employment, claims and denials. During the 13 year period from 1972 through 1984, all employers in Washington paid the same unemployment insurance (UI)...

Over the past thirty years, immigration has increased, immigrant characteristics have changed, and the relative mean wages of immigrants vis … vis the native born have declined. Using data from four U.S. Censuses (1960 - 1990) we examine changes in the wage structure and their role in...

We examine the distributional consequences of the UI payroll tax using representative individual microdata. We calculate taxes paid by individual wage and individual and household income deciles, incorporating the effects of multiple job holding and turnover. This tax distribution is compared...

Using data on all new admissions to California state prisons in 1986, 1990, and 1996, we find that the foreign born have a very different offense mix from native-born inmates, with foreigners much more likely to be serving time for drug offenses. We document and discuss many of the substantial...

The perception that immigration adversely affects crime rates led to legislation in the 1990s that particularly increased punishment of criminal aliens. In fact, immigrants have much lower institutionalization (incarceration) rates than the native born - on the order of one-fifth the rate of...