Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Cross sectional analysis finds that individuals with lower income are more likely to be overweight or obese. Does this imply that increased income causes weight loss? A paper by Au and Johnston (2015) find the opposite result. In this paper, we use nationally representative panel data and exogenous wealth shocks (primarily inheritances and lottery wins)…
How do we measure the financial burden of elderly obesity? At first this seems like an easy question to answer. Find the average medical spending of the obese elderly and compare that to the spending of an elderly individual of healthy weight. Yet causation is difficult to show. True, it is possible that the obese…
Do state physical education (PE) requirement help to decrease the percentage of children and teens who are overweight? This is the question Cawley, Meyerhoefer and Newhouse investigate in their 2007 Health Economics paper. One would certainly not be surprised if PE requirements decrease the prevalence of obesity, but this may not be correct. PE requirements…
Are married people more likely to be obese than single individuals? More to the point, does being married cause obesity? Married individuals are generally older than never-married individuals and since age is correlated with obesity, there could be a spurious relationship between marriage and obesity. One may think that married individuals are not on the…
The simple answer for this is that calorie intake is higher than the number of calories burned. But why are people getting fatter? In which countries are people the fattest? This is the questioned tackle in a working paper by Sara Bleich and colleagues “Why is the Developed World Obese?” Obesity is a serious disease:…