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...

The potential influence of peers and social networks on individual outcomes is important to a variety of educational policy debates including school vouchers, special education, middle school grade configurations and tracking. Researchers usually address the identification problems associated...

We investigate how the gender composition of migrant flows and the intra-household allocation of labor are employed as risk-coping strategies in El Salvador. We show that agricultural productivity shocks primarily increased male migration to the US and, at the same time, increased the number of...

We use panel data from El Salvador to investigate the intra-household allocation of labor as a risk-coping strategy. We show that adverse agricultural productivity shocks primarily increased male migration to the US with much smaller effects on female migration. This is consistent with the...

We investigate the proposition that the health of migrants does not constitute a random sample of the health of the sending region using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics on internal migration within the United States. Panel data is crucial, as it enables us to observe geographic...