Ross A Hammond, Ruth LevineEconomic Studies Program, Brookings Institution, Washington DC, USAAbstract: Over the past several decades, obesity has grown into a major global epidemic. In the United States (US), more than two-thirds of adults are now overweight and one-third is obese. In this...

This paper has two main contributions. Firstly, we introduce a new approach, the latent instrumental variables (LIV) method, to estimate regression coefficients consistently in a simple linear regression model where regressor-error correlations (endogeneity) are likely to be present. The LIV...