Bulimia Nervosa is a detrimental eating disorder that impacts millions of women. We examine the role played by socioeconomic factors and personality traits in bulimic behavior. Using data on eating disordered behavior from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Growth and Health Study, we present results showing that personality traits are significant determinants of bulimic behavior, even after controlling for race and class. This finding suggests that policies based on both the SES characteristics and the personality traits will be more effective for targeting those at risk.
More than 80 percent of advertisements in political campaigns are negative; a type of messaging that is much less common in markets for consumer goods and services. Why is negativity so specific to political campaigns? In new research, Amit Gandhi, Daniela Iorio, and Carly Urban explain that the dual Democrat-Republican nature of US politics encourages candidates to go negative. They find that elections with two candidates are twice as likely to see negative ads compared to those with a greater number of candidates, and argue that the rise of a viable third party in the US might reduce the amount of attack advertising.
We study the relationship between education and HIV status using nationally representative data from 39 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in Sub-Saharan Africa. First, we construct an innovative algorithm that systematically defines aggregate stages of the HIV epidemic in a comparable manner across time and across space. Second, we exploit the variation in the aggregate HIV stages in the DHS data, and find that the education gradient in HIV shows a U-shaped (positive-zero-positive) pattern over the course of the epidemic. Further, educational disparities in the number of extramarital partners are largely consistent with the evolution of the education gradient in HIV. We propose a simple theoretical model of risky sex choices that accounts for these stylized facts.
In this paper we explore a serious eating disorder, bulimia nervosa (BN), which afflicts a surprising number of girls in the US. We challenge the long-held belief that BN primarily affects high income White teenagers, using a unique data set on adolescent females evaluated regarding their tendencies towards bulimic behaviors independent of any diagnoses or treatment they have received. Our results reveal that African Americans are more likely to exhibit bulimic behavior than Whites; as are girls from low income families compared to middle and high income families. We use another data set to show that who is diagnosed with an eating disorder is in accord with popular beliefs, suggesting that African American and low-income girls are being under-diagnosed for BN. Our findings have important implications for public policy since they provide direction to policy makers regarding which adolescent females are most at risk for BN. Our results are robust to different model specifications and identifying assumptions.
Eating disorders are an important and growing health concern, and Bulimia Nervosa (BN) accounts for the largest fraction of eating disorders. BN is characterized by recurrent episodes of binge-eating followed by compensatory purging, and is especially serious given its increasingly compulsive nature. However, remarkably little is known about its addictive nature and the factors determining the incidence of BN. We use a unique panel data set to examine whether bulimic behavior satisfies the economic definition of addiction. Further, we examine whether BN is a rational addiction in the sense of Becker and Murphy (1988), where both the lead and lag of bulimic behaviors should help explain current behavior after controlling for observed and unobserved heterogeneity. We find there is substantial persistence in BN over time due to state dependence and that this result is very robust to different model specifications and identifying assumptions. Thus BN satisfies the economic definition of addictive behavior. Our results have important implications for public policy. They suggest that: i) treatment for BN should receive the same insurance coverage as treatment of other addictive behaviors such as alcoholism and drug addiction; ii) preventive educational programs that facilitate the detection of BN at an early age should be coupled with more intense (rehabilitation) treatment for individuals exhibiting addictive behaviors. Moreover, bulimic behavior also appears to be a rational addiction, although this result is more tentative as the data (and econometric theory) do not permit similar robustness checks. Finally, we find that bulimic behavior is decreasing in income and parent's education; moreover when race plays a role, African Americans are more likely to exhibit bulimic behavior. These results stand in stark contrast to the popular conceptions of who is most likely to experience BN, and we argue that this is a result of differences in diagnosis of BN across racial and income classes.
Why is advertising such a prominent feature of competition in the political market? We propose an explanation that is based on the \fewness of competitors in a political race. The typical election in the United States is a two-candidate race. In such duopoly contests, there is a simple economic rationale for going negative relative to non- duopoly contests: when the number of competitors is greater than two, engaging in ads creates positive externalities for opponents that are not the object of the attack. In contrast, positive ads benefit only the advertiser. To empirically investigate the hypothesis that the number of competitors can explain the volume of advertising in an election, we focus on US non-presidential primary contests in 2004, where the nature of primaries provides us with a cross section of independent races and large variation in the number of entrants. Our estimation employs novel data from the Wisconsin Advertising Project, which contains information on all political advertisements aired in the top 100 media markets in 2004 races. We find that duopolies are twice as likely to air a ad when compared to non-duopolies, and that doubling the number of competitors drives the rate of advertising in an election close to zero. These results are robust to the inclusion of a variety of controls and instruments for entrants in the race.
Why is negative advertising such a prominent feature of competition in the US political market? We hypothesize that two-candidate races provide stronger incentives for going negative relative to non-duopoly contests: when the number of competitors is greater than two, airing negative ads creates positive externalities for opponents that are not the object of the attack. To investigate the empirical relevance of the fewness of competitors in explaining the volume of negative advertising, we exploit variation in the number of entrants running for US non-presidential primaries from 2000 through 2008. Duopolies are over twice as likely to air a negative ad when compared to non-duopolies, and the tendency for negative advertising decreases in the number of competitors. The estimates are robust to various specification checks and the inclusion of potential confounding factors at the race, candidate, and advertisement levels. ( JEL D72, D79, L10, L19)
In multiparty parliamentary democracies government coalitions frequently reshuffle the allocation of cabinet posts, and cabinets terminate before the end of the legislature. I interpret these events as equilibrium outcomes of a strategic interaction among political parties. Parties’ incentives to terminate the government and seek early elections depend on future electoral prospects, and electoral opinion polls convey information regarding possible shifts in the electoral support. I develop a dynamic strategic model of government formation and termination, and structurally estimate the model using newly collected data on eleven Western European parliamentary democracies over the period 1970-2002. Using the estimated model I conduct counterfactual experiments aimed to evaluate the effects of poll informativeness and institutional features on the survival probabilities of coalition governments.
We investigate whether the development of eating disorders, in the form of purging, is influenced by peers’body size through interpersonal comparisons. Using detailed information on recent cohorts of U.S. teenagers, we document a sizeable and significant negative effect of high school peers’ body mass index (BMI) on purging behavior during the adolescence for females, but not for males. Interpersonal comparisons operate through the formation of a distorted self-perception: teenage girls with relatively thin female peers perceive themselves as heavier than they actually are. The girls who are more susceptible to peer influences are those having peers who are thinner, more popular, more (verbally) able, and with more educated parents.
Bulimia nervosa (BN) is a growing health concern and its consequences are especially serious given the compulsive nature of the disorder. However, little is known about the mechanisms underlying the persistent nature of BN. Using data from the NHLBI Growth and Health Study and instrumental variable techniques, we document that unobserved heterogeneity plays a role in the persistence of BN, but up to two-thirds of it is due to state dependence. Our findings suggest that the timing of policy is crucial: Preventive educational programs should be coupled with more intense (rehabilitation) treatment at the early stages of the BN behaviors.
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