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Working Paper
Reading, writing, and raisinets: are school finances contributing to children’s obesity?
The proportion of adolescents in the United States who are obese has nearly tripled over the last two decades. At the same time, schools, often citing financial pressures, have given students greater access to ?junk? foods and soda pop, using proceeds from these sales to fund school programs. We examine whether schools under financial pressure are more likely to adopt potentially unhealthful food policies. Next, we examine whether students? Body Mass Index (BMI) is higher in counties where a greater proportion of schools are predicted to allow these food policies. Because the financial ...
Journal Article
Childhood obesity: an issue for public health advocates, researchers, and community development practitioners
Obesity rates for U.S. children have risen precipitously over the past 20 years. According to data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys from 1999?2002, 15 percent of children on average, ages 2?19 are obese. With little evidence that individual weight loss programs can solve the problem, attention is increasingly turning to the environment in which children live, in an effort to understand both the causes of and potential solutions to childhood obesity. Drawing on recent research, this article provides an overview of childhood obesity trends from the 1970s to 2002, ...
Journal Article
Obesity, disability, and the labor force
Men of prime working age have increased their non-employment rates over the past 30 years, and disability rates have also increased. Many have noted that this increase has happened against a backdrop of generally improving health in the U.S. population. However, obesity has increased substantially over this period. The authors find that changes in the characteristics of male workers?including age, race, ethnicity, and obesity levels?can explain a large portion (around 40 percent) of the increase in non-employment.
Working Paper
Female offenders use of social welfare programs before and after jail and prison: does prison cause welfare dependency?
Prior studies indicate that incarcerated women are among the most economically disadvantaged populations in the U.S. In this paper we focus on the links between incarceration and use of the social welfare system. Is prison, for example associated with increased welfare dependency? To better understand this relationship, we examine the temporal pattern of social welfare receipt for 45,000 female offenders from Cook County, Illinois over a ten year period. We find that this group does in fact have high rates of social welfare receipt, especially if they were incarcerated in state prison rather ...
Working Paper
Maternal employment and overweight children
This paper seeks to determine whether a causal relationship exists between maternal employment and childhood overweight. We use matched mother/child data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and employ econometric techniques to control for observable and unobservable differences across individuals and families that may influence both children's weight and their mothers' work patterns. Our results indicate that a child is more likely to be overweight if his/her mother worked more hours per week over the child's life. Analyses by subgroups show that it is higher socioeconomic status ...
Working Paper
Why are immigrants' incarceration rates so low? evidence on selective immigration, deterrence, and deportation
Much of the concern about immigration adversely affecting crime derives from the fact that immigrants tend to have characteristics in common with native born populations that are disproportionately incarcerated. This perception of a link between immigration and crime led to legislation in the 1990s increasing punishments toward criminal aliens. Despite the widespread perception of a link between immigration and crime, immigrants have much lower institutionalization (incarceration) rates than the native born. More recently arrived immigrants have the lowest comparative incarceration rates, and ...
The Labor Market for Childcare Workers
Each day, millions of parents rely on childcare workers to care for their young children. The labor market for childcare workers determines the wages paid to these workers and affects the operating costs of childcare businesses as well as the price and availability of childcare. As part of our Spotlight on Childcare and the Labor Market—a targeted effort to understand how access to childcare can affect employment and the economy—we use several data sources to study the paid childcare labor market.1 We first describe who childcare workers are, how many there are, where they work, and how ...
Newsletter
Assessing the impact of job loss on workers and firms
Many economists agree that the United States? openness to competition and technological change raises our living standards, but sometimes results in job losses. This article summarizes ?Job Loss: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Responses,? a conference which was cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Joyce Foundation.
Working Paper
Women and the Phillips curve: do women’s and men’s labor market outcomes differentially affect real wage growth and inflation?
During the economic expansion of the 1990s, the United States enjoyed both low inflation rates and low levels of unemployment. Juhn, Murphy, and Topel (2002) point out that the low unemployment rates for men in the 1990s were accompanied by historically high rates of non-employment suggesting that the 1990s economy was not as strong as the unemployment rate might indicate. We include women in the analysis and examine whether the Phillips curve relationships between real compensation growth, changes in inflation, and labor market slackness are the same for men and women and whether measures of ...