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Author: Franz, Gregor Andreas Gottfried
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Franz, Gregor Andreas Gottfried |
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Essays in Health and Urban Economics Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California - Irvine, 2008 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) Keyword(s): Body Mass Index (BMI); Cross-national Analysis; Economics, Demographic; Economics, Regional; Geocoded Data; German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP); Germany, German; Health Care; Heterogeneity; Labor Market Outcomes; Labor Market Studies, Geographic; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Obesity; Urbanization/Urban Living; Weight Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. This dissertation deals with identifying causal effects in three health and urban economic topics. In my first chapter I examine if the number of physicians in a geographical location affects the population health in that area. I construct a unique panel dataset and use a region fixed effects and instrumental variable strategy to examine the relationship between physician density and population health outcomes in more detail. The results suggest that unobserved heterogeneity between my measures of population health and physician density is present. I conclude that this evidence does not support the claim that an increase in physician density would increase population health in the U.S. In my second chapter I seek to test the hypothesis that suburban living environments lead to a higher body weight compared to central city environments. I use the geographic information from the confidential NLSY79 files in conjunction with census tract population density data for the years 1981 to 2004. The effect of population density on the body weight of individuals who move is estimated conditioning on individual and area level characteristics. The chapter concludes that the actual effect of population density on the weight of individuals is not as large as the public health literature would want people to believe, but it is neither as insignificant as the urban economic literature to date estimated. In my last chapter I survey the literature on labor market effects of obesity and then estimate the effect of obesity on labor market outcomes in Germany. To date, only one study briefly considers the effects of weight on labor market outcomes in Germany. This chapter argues that, apart from individual earnings, other labor market outcomes in conjunction with additional data sheds more light on the relationship between weight and labor market outcomes in Germany. This chapter examines the relationship between body weight and labor market outcomes in Germany. While no definite conclusion is reached, this is the first study that attempts to study the relationship between body weight and labor market outcomes in Germany in this detail. |
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Bibliography Citation
Franz, Gregor Andreas Gottfried. Essays in Health and Urban Economics. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California - Irvine, 2008. |