The increasing rate of obesity in the U.S., particularly among low income households, necessitates a thorough understanding of the relationship between obesity and in-kind federal benefits such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly the Food Stamp Program. However,...

There is an increasing perception among policy makers that food stamp benefits contribute positively to adult obesity rates. We show that these results are heavily dependent on one's assumptions regarding the accuracy of reported food stamp participation. When allowing for misreporting, we find...

There is an increasing perception among policy makers that food stamp benefits contribute positively to adult obesity rates. We show that these results are heavily dependent on one's assumptions regarding the accuracy of reported food stamp participation. When allowing for misreporting, we find...

There is an increasing perception among policy makers that food stamp benefits contribute positively to adult obesity rates. We show that these results are heavily dependent on one’s assumptions regarding the accuracy of reported food stamp participation. When allowing for misreporting, we...

Researchers are often interested in combined measures such as overall ratings, indices of physical or mental health, or health-related quality-of-life (HRQoL) outcomes. Such measures are typically composed of two or more underlying discrete variables. I show that estimating the effect of a...

We examine the response of Medicare Advantage contracts to published quality ratings. We identify the effect of star ratings on premiums using a regression discontinuity design that exploits plausibly random variation around rating thresholds. We find that 3, 3.5, and 4-star contracts in 2009...

We present a new Stata command, tebounds, which implements a variety of techniques to bound the average treatment effect (ATE) of a binary treatment on a binary outcome in light of endogenous and misreported treatment assignment. To tighten the worst case bounds, the Monotone Treatment Selection...