type="main" xml:id="obes12034-abs-0001"> <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>We correct an error from Halliday (2010) in which we explored the degree to which household size is measured with errors.

We consider the nexus of intra-household transfers, the sex composition of the sibship, and parental retirement behavior in Korea. We provide evidence that the cost of raising sons is higher than it is for daughters in Korea. Thus, in the absence of sufficient transfers from adult sons to...

"Glass ceilings" and "sticky floors" are typical explanations for the low representation of women in top executive positions, but a focus on gender differences in promotions provides only a partial explanation. We consider the life-cycle of executive employment, which allows for a full...

We investigate the evolution of health over the life-cycle. We allow for two sources of persistence: unobserved heterogeneity and state dependence. Estimation indicates that there is a large degree of heterogeneity. For half the population, there are modest degrees of state dependence. For the...

We investigate the evolution of health inequality over the life-course. Health is modeled as a latent variable that is determined by three factors: endowments, and permanent and transitory shocks. We employ Simulated Minimum Distance and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to estimate the model....

In this paper, we quantify the effects of health on time allocation. We estimate that improvements in health status have large and positive effects on time allocated to home and market production and large negative effects on time spent watching TV, sleeping, and consuming other types of...

Despite the urgent public health implications, relatively little is yet known about the effect of peers on adolescent weight gain. We describe trends and features of adolescent BMI in a nationally representative dataset and document correlations in weight gain among peers. We find strong...

Recent research in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) purports to show the existence of peer effects in the spread of obesity. Using a dataset of 5124 residents from Framingham, Massachusetts spanning the years 1971 to 2003, the authors show correlations between own weight gain and...

We investigate the impact of exogenous income shocks on health using twenty years of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. To unravel the impact of income on health from unobserved heterogeneity and reverse causality, we employ techniques from the literature on the estimation of dynamic...

We consider the identification of state dependence in a dynamic Logit model with timevariant transition probabilities and an arbitrary distribution of the unobserved heterogeneity. We derive a simple result that allows us to test for the presence of state dependence in this model. Monte Carlo...