A large literature links early environments and later outcomes, such as cognition; however, little is known about the mechanisms. One potential mechanism is sensitivity to early environments that is moderated or amplified by the genotype. With this mechanism in mind, a complementary literature...

This paper contributes to the debate over the effectiveness of education policies in reducing overall health inequalities as compared to public health actions directed at the less-educated. Recentered Influence Function (RIF) regressions are used to decompose the contribution of education to the...

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, the current study examines the effect of type I and type II diabetes on employment status and wages. The results suggest that both the probability of employment and wages are negatively related to the number of years since the...

The paper estimates the value a mother assigns to own health relative to child health. Estimation of relative health valuation requires the decomposition of a child health improvement into its direct effect on the child's health and its indirect effect, through improvements in maternal health....

Contrary to conventional wisdom, NHANES data indicate that the poor have never had a statistically significant higher prevalence of overweight status at any time in the last 35 years. Despite this empirical evidence, the view that the poor are less healthy in terms of excess accumulation of fat...

We estimated the relationship between weight status and earnings among women participating in the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Surveys between 1983 and 2002 conducted in Cebu, Philippines. Women working for pay were selected for the analysis. We used fixed effects estimation to account...

Children's physical health problems have clear and lasting impacts on a variety of later life outcomes, as a growing body of research has shown. Furthermore, problems such as obesity, motor impairment, and chronic diseases entail high social costs, particularly when childhood health problems...

Height is a marker for health, cognitive ability and economic productivity. Recent research on the determinants of height suggests that postneonatal mortality predicts height because it is a measure of the early life disease environment to which a cohort is exposed. This article advances the...

Rising rates of obesity are a public health concern in every industrialized country. This study investigates the relationship between obesity and health care expenditure in Australia, where the rate of obesity has tripled in the last three decades. Now one in four Australians is considered...