This paper provides a theoretical and empirical examination of the long-run growth in weight over time. We argue that technological change has induced weight growth by making home- and market-production more sedentary and by lowering food prices through agricultural innovation. We analyze how...

A central problem in applied empirical work is to separate out the patterns in the data that are due to poor production of the data, such as e.g. non-response and measurement errors, from the patterns attributable to the economic phenomena studied. This paper interprets this inference problem as...

Despite the conceptual differences between for-profit and non-profit firms stressed in conventional economic analyses of the non-profit sector, U.S. antitrust law generally does not distinguish between these two organizational forms. This paper argues that the same incentives to restrain trade...

In the United States, drugs are jointly regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration, which oversees premarket clinical trials designed to ensure drug safety and efficacy, and the liability system, which allows patients to sue manufacturers for unsafe drugs. In this paper, we examine the...

This paper presents a dynamic theory of body weight and develops its implications. We argue that technological change has induced weight growth by making home- and market-production more sedentary and by lowering food prices through agricultural innovation. In addition, we illustrate that, while...

We use panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to investigate on-the-job exercise and weight. For male workers, job-related exercise has causal effects on weight, but for female workers, the effects seem primarily selective. A man who spends 18 years in the most physical...

This paper studies an economic model of the dynamic spread of an infectious disease, contrasting its implications in terms of the occurrence of the disease itself, as well as the effects of public health interventions, with those of mathematical epidemiology. Copyright 1996 by Economics...