Stephanie von Hinke

While most applications of peer effects that use IV do include the instrument at the individual level and therefore avoid the inconsistency and bias described here, a number of papers have not done so. More generally, we have found no discussion of this issue in the literature. Given the widespread use of IV in peer effects models, we argue that it is important to raise awareness of this among both econometricians and applied researchers.

Getting a healthy start: the effectiveness of targeted benefits for improving dietary choices

The structure of this paper is as follows: Section 2 gives the background to the study and discusses some of the existing literature. We set out our methodology in Section 3, where we present an approach for comparing individual and county-level business cycle estimates. We describe the data in Section 4. The results are presented in Section 5. Section 6 concludes.

We study whether and how individuals protect energy intakes against income shocks and we find that households use substitution, both between and within spending categories. Total nutritional intakes are almost fully protected against income shocks and 12-16% of permanent income shocks on food spending is transmitted to energy intake.

This paper offers an economic model of smoking and body weight and provides new empirical evidence on the extent to which the demand for cigarettes is derived from the demand for weight loss. In the model, smoking causes weight loss in addition to having direct utility benefits and direct health consequences. It predicts that some individuals smoke for weight loss and that the practice is more common among those who consider themselves overweight and those who experience greater disutility from excess weight.

On the 7th of July 2005 (henceforth 7/7), four extremist Islamic terrorist bombers targeted London's transport network, killing 52 passengers and injuring hundreds more. Using prerecorded statements, the bombers threatened further acts of terrorism. Indeed, just 2 weeks later, a further four suicide bombers attempted but failed to execute similar attacks.

The first scientific study that examined the effects of excessive alcohol intake during pregnancy was published by a Liverpool prison physician in 1899 (Sullivan, 1899). He argued that alcohol consumption caused the higher rates of stillbirth observed among female alcoholic prisoners compared to their sober counterparts. The detrimental effects of excessive drinking during pregnancy are currently well known. The effects of low‐to‐moderate drinking, however, are less conclusive. Indeed, there are conflicting recommendations regarding the ‘threshold’ for maternal prenatal alcohol consumption, ranging from total abstinence in most countries including the US to restricted consumption in the UK.

This paper explores whether the state provision of school meals in the 1980s crowded out private provision by examining two policy reforms that radically altered the UK school meal service. Both reforms effectively increased the cost of school meals for one group (the treated), leaving another unaffected (the controls).

They examine whether height in children causally affects a wide range of outcomes and use children's genetic variants as instrumental variables for child height. The results suggest that height is an important factor in human capital accumulation and show that being tall may not only confer advantage but also disadvantage.

The use of genetic markers as instrumental variables (IV) is receiving increasing attention from economists. This paper examines the conditions that need to be met for genetic variants to be used as instruments.