Much research has focused on the proximate determinants of weight gain and obesity for adolescents, but not much information has emerged on identifying which adolescents might be at risk or on prevention. This research focuses on a distal determinant of teenage weight gain, namely changes in the...

In light of the current economic crisis, we estimate hazard models of divorce to determine how state and national unemployment rates affect the likelihood of divorce. With 89,340 observations over the 1978-2006 period for 7633 couples from the 1979 NLSY, we find mixed evidence on whether...

Building on arguments by Joshua Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke arguments for how the teaching of undergraduate econometrics could become more effective, I propose a redesign of graduate econometrics that would better serve most students and help make the field of economics more relevant. The...

We assess whether black-white disparities in commitments to prison or diversions to treatment for drug offenders in California can be explained by differences in the characteristics of criminal cases and whether case characteristics are weighed differently by race. We also examine whether the...