The Effect of Fast Food Restaurants on Obesity and Weight Gain

By Janet Currie, Stefano DellaVigna, Enrico Moretti, and Vikram Pathania

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2010

We investigate how changes in the supply of fast food restaurants affect weight outcomes of 3 million children and 3 million pregnant women. Among ninth graders, a fast food restaurant within 0.1 miles of a school results in a 5.2 percent increase in obes...

Reconsidering the poverty line

[Research Highlight]

November 30, 2017

Is the World Bank underestimating the minimum income needed to survive?

The Impacts of Microfinance: Evidence from Joint-Liability Lending in Mongolia

By Orazio Attanasio, Britta Augsburg, Ralph De Haas, Emla Fitzsimons, and Heike Harmgart

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2015

We present evidence from a randomized field experiment in rural Mongolia to assess the poverty impacts of a joint-liability microcredit program targeted at women. We find a positive impact of access to group loans on female entrepreneurship and household ...

Understanding the Mechanisms of Economic Development

[Symposium: The Agenda for Development Economics]

By Angus Deaton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010

In this paper, I advocate the investigation, testing, and modification of mechanisms as a progressive empirical research strategy for the field of economic development (and other areas of applied economics). I discuss three lines of work that have elucida...

Where Does the Money Go? Best and Worst Practices in Foreign Aid

[Symposium: Development]

By William Easterly and Tobias Pfutze

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2008

This paper does not address the issue of aid effectiveness -- that is, the extent to which foreign aid dollars actually achieve their goals -- but on "best practices" in the way in which official aid is given, an important component of the wider debate. F...

Policy Watch: The Food Stamp Program and Welfare Reform

By Betsey A. Kuhn, Pamela Allen Dunn, David Smallwood, Kenneth Hanson, Jim Blaylock, and Stephen Vogel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1996

Major changes have been proposed for the Food Stamp Program, including replacing the program with block grants to the states, cashing out the benefits, and reducing program funding from baseline levels. This paper will explore the impacts of food stamp re...

In Honor of David Kreps, Winner of the John Bates Clark Medal

By Jean Tirole

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1990

David Kreps is the winner of the 1989 John Bates Clark Medal, given to "that American economist under forty who is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge." I will try to explain where Kreps's contributions fit i...

Quantile Regression

[Symposium: Econometric Tools]

By Roger Koenker and Kevin F. Hallock

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2001

Quantile regression, as introduced by Koenker and Bassett (1978), may be viewed as an extension of classical least squares estimation of conditional mean models to the estimation of an ensemble of models for several conditional quantile functions. The cen...

Global Biofuels: Key to the Puzzle of Grain Market Behavior

[Symposium: Agriculture]

By Brian Wright

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2014

In the last half-decade, sharp jumps in the prices of wheat, rice, and corn, which furnish about two-thirds of the calorie requirements of mankind, have attracted worldwide attention. These price jumps in grains have also revealed the chaotic state of e...

The Role of Preferences and Opportunity Costs in Determining the Time Allocated to Housework

By Leslie S. Stratton

American Economic Review, May 2012

Research on intrahousehold time allocations has assumed that housework is a necessary evil and focused exclusively on the causal role of opportunity costs. In fact, agents likely act to maximize happiness, and preferences regarding even mundane household ...

Do Poverty Traps Exist? Assessing the Evidence

[Symposium: Classic Ideas in Development]

By Aart Kraay and David McKenzie

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2014

A "poverty trap" can be understood as a set of self-reinforcing mechanisms whereby countries start poor and remain poor: poverty begets poverty, so that current poverty is itself a direct cause of poverty in the future. The idea of a poverty trap has this...

The Retirement Consumption Puzzle in China

By Hongbin Li, Xinzheng Shi, and Binzhen Wu

American Economic Review, May 2015

Using data from China's Urban Household Survey and exploiting China's mandatory retirement policy, we use the regression discontinuity approach to estimate the impact of retirement on household expenditures. Retirement reduces total non-durable expenditur...

The Caloric Costs of Culture: Evidence from Indian Migrants

By David Atkin

American Economic Review, April 2016

Anthropologists have documented substantial and persistent differences in food preferences across social groups. My paper asks whether such food cultures can constrain caloric intake? I first document that interstate migrants within India consume fewe...

Do Prices and Attributes Explain International Differences in Food Purchases?

By Pierre Dubois, Rachel Griffith, and Aviv Nevo

American Economic Review, March 2014

Food purchases differ substantially across countries. We use detailed household level data from the US, France and the UK to (i) document these differences; (ii) estimate a demand system for food and nutrients, and (iii) simulate counterfactual choices ...

Agriculture and the Transition to the Market

[Symposium: Economic Transition in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe]

By Karen Brooks, J. Luis Guasch, Avishay Braverman, and Csaba Csaki

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1991

Agricultural sectors in Eastern and Central Europe are large, and a substantial number of people are directly affected by changes in producer prices, farm employment, and land ownership. Retail food markets are among the most distorted in the pre-transiti...

Long-Run Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net

By Hilary Hoynes, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and Douglas Almond

American Economic Review, April 2016

We examine the impact of a positive and policy-driven change in economic resources available in utero and during childhood. We focus on the introduction of the Food Stamp Program, which was rolled out across counties between 1961 and 1975. We use the P...

Calorie Posting in Chain Restaurants

By Bryan Bollinger, Phillip Leslie, and Alan Sorensen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2011

We study the impact of mandatory calorie posting on consumers' purchase decisions using detailed data from Starbucks. We find that average calories per transaction fall by 6 percent. The effect is almost entirely related to changes in consumers' food choi...

The Effect of Cash, Vouchers, and Food Transfers on Intimate Partner Violence: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Northern Ecuador

By Melissa Hidrobo, Amber Peterman, and Lori Heise

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2016

Using a randomized experiment in Ecuador, this study provides evidence on whether cash, vouchers, and food transfers targeted to women and intended to reduce poverty and food insecurity also affected intimate partner violence. Results indicate that transf...

Does Quality Adjustment Matter for Technologically Stable Products? An Application to the CPI for Food

By John S. Greenlees and Robert McClelland

American Economic Review, May 2011

Most indexes in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) use a form of the "matched-model" approach. It is frequently assumed that this approach accurately reflects inflation for items that have no major trend in quality. In this paper we investigate that hypothesi...

Strategies for Promoting Healthier Food Choices

By Julie S. Downs, George Loewenstein, and Jessica Wisdom

American Economic Review, May 2009