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Title: Essays on Health Economics and Agricultural Labor Migration
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Fan, Maoyong |
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Essays on Health Economics and Agricultural Labor Migration Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2009 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) Keyword(s): Body Mass Index (BMI); Food Stamps (see Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program); Obesity; Poverty Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. The first essay of the dissertation, entitled "Do Food Stamps Contribute to Obesity in Low-Income Women?" estimates the effects of food stamps on obesity, overweight and body mass index (BMI) of low-income women. This question is particularly important because participants are substantially more likely to be obese than are nonparticipants. Our analysis differs from previous research in three aspects. First, we exploit a rich longitudinal data set, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79), to distinguish between full-time and part-time participation. Second, instead of making parametric assumptions on outcomes, we employ a variety of difference-in-difference matching estimators to control for selection bias. Third, we estimate both short-term (one year of participation) and long-term (three years of participation) treatment effects. Empirical results show that, after controlling for selection bias and defining the treatment and comparison groups carefully, there is little evidence that food stamps are responsible for obesity or higher BMI in female participants. Our estimates are robust to different definitions of the treatment and comparison groups and to various matching algorithms. We further examine prior studies and apply their methods to our samples. We repeat analyses of previous studies using our sample and find that prior studies significantly overstate the causal relationship between the FSP and obesity. |
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Bibliography Citation
Fan, Maoyong. Essays on Health Economics and Agricultural Labor Migration. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2009. |