The Impact of State Physical Education Requirements on Youth Physical Activity and Overweight

To combat childhood overweight, which has risen dramatically in the past three decades, many medical and public health organizations have called for students to spend more time in physical education (PE) classes. This paper is the first to exploit state PE requirements as quasi-natural experiments in order to estimate the causal impact of PE on student activity and weight. We study nationwide data from the YRBSS for 1999, 2001, and 2003 merged with data on state minimum PE requirements from the 1994 and 2000 School Health Policies and Programs Study and the 2001 Shape of the Nation Report. We find that certain state regulations are effective in raising the number of minutes during which students are active in PE. Our results also indicate that additional PE time raises the number of days per week that students report having exercised or engaged in strength-building activities, but lowers the number of days in which students report light physical activity. PE time has no detectable impact on youth BMI or the probability that a student is overweight. We conclude that while raising PE requirements may make students more active by some (but not all) measures, there is not yet the scientific base to declare raising PE requirements an anti-obesity initiative.

The Hyde Amendment: An Analysis of Its State Progeny

In the landmark case of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court held that the constitutional right to privacy included a woman’s decision on whether to terminate her pregnancy. The right to terminate the pregnancy, however, was not absolute, and had to be weighed, at various stages of the pregnancy, against the state’s “important and legitimate interest in preserving and protecting the health of the pregnant woman … [and] in protecting the potentiality of human life.” Justice Blackmun, at the outset of his majority opinion, acknowledged the Court’s “awareness of the sensitive and emotional nature of the abortion controversy, and of the vigorous opposing views, … and of the deep and seemingly absolute convictions that the subject inspires.” In view of this aura of emotionalism that surrounds the topic of abortion, it is not surprising that Roe has born the progeny it has in the six years since the case was decided. A rather predictable problem, once the Court has declared that a woman has a right to choose to undergo an abortion, is the source of the funds that will enable indigent women to exercise their right. The first attack on this issue, in Beal v. Doe, focused on whether states participating in the Medicaid program should be required to provide indigent women with funds for abortions which were nontherapeutic. The Beal Court held that the states were not so required. Congress’ enactment of the Hyde Amendment, a rider to the 1977 Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) Appropriation Act, precluded states in the Medicaid program from receiving federal funding for abortions except where the abortion was necessary to save the life of the mother. This limitation on funding goes beyond the holding of Beal in that Beal merely allowed states to withhold funds for purely elective abortions. Under the Hyde Amendment, women seeking abortions which would be considered medically necessary, that is, necessary for the mental or physical well-being of the mother, could not receive money through state Medicaid programs unless the state was willing to absorb the cost. Several states have not been willing to absorb the costs of those abortions made ineligible for federal funding by the Hyde Amendment, and herein lies a new, vital area of litigation. In reaction to the federal Hyde Amendment, states have begun to enact their own “Hyde-type” amendments. These state statutes, insofar as they deprive Medicaid recipients of the ability to obtain “necessary” therapeutic abortions, are currently being attacked. These attacks, the most recent progeny of the abortion issue, will serve as the focus of this comment

Securities Law: The Exclusion of Noncontributory, Compulsory Pension Plans

International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. Daniel, 439 U.S. 551 (1979). Recent Supreme Court decisions have illustrated a trend toward a more restrictive approach to actions brought pursuant to section 10(b)2 and rule l0b-53 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. Daniel, in which the Supreme Court rejected an expansive reading of the securities laws, is the most recent case exemplifying this trend. The Court in Daniel refused to accept the Seventh Circuit’s determination that a noncontributory, compulsory pension plan was a security within the definition set forth in section 3(a)(10) of the 1934 Act

CONSISTENT ESTIMATION OF LONGITUDINAL CENSORED DEMAND SYSTEMS

In this paper we derive a joint continuous/censored demand system suitable for the analysis of commodity demand relationships using panel data. Unobserved heterogeneity is controlled for using a correlated random effects specification and a Generalized Method of Moments framework used to estimate the model in two stages. While relatively small differences in elasticity estimates are found between a flexible specification and one that restricts the relationship between the random effect and budget shares to be time invariant, larger differences are observed between the most flexible random effects model and a pooled cross sectional estimator. The results suggest the limited ability of such estimators to control for preference heterogeneity and unit value endogeneity leads to parameter bias.Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Production diversity and dietary diversity in smallholder subsistence- and market-oriented farming households in rural Paraguay

Objective: Determine the association between on-farm production diversity (PD) and quality of household diets in smallholder farming households in rural Paraguay and assess hypothesized mechanisms for this association via both subsistence- and market-oriented pathways.CONACYT – Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y TecnologíaPROCIENCI

How Do Health and Social Insurance Programs Affect the Land and Labor Allocations of Farm Households? Evidence from Taiwan

Using a unique dataset of 703,287 farm operators from the Taiwanese Census of Agriculture merged to administrative records from the National Farmers' Health Insurance (FHI) program, we examine the effects of the enrollment in the FHI program on farmers’ on- and off-farm labor supply and the amount of land they allocate to Taiwan’s land retirement program. In order to account for non-random self-selection into the FHI we use a matching procedure to estimate the impact of the program on land and labor allocations. Our results indicate that participation in the FHI increases (decrease) on (off) farm labor supply, and decreases the amount of land enrolled in the land retirement program. Our findings have implication for health care reforms that have been initiated in other countries, and the United States in particular.National Farmer's Health Insurance Program, labor supply, land retirement program, Taiwan., Agricultural and Food Policy, Health Economics and Policy, Labor and Human Capital,

For those states that expand it, Medicaid may be a gateway to enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for those in poor health

The federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) provides more than 45 million Americans on low incomes with assistance to purchase food. Poor access to food – and low quality food – is often a key contributor to poor health outcomes, meaning that policymakers are keen to increase the number of SNAP enrollments by the chronically ill. In new research, Chad D. Meyerhoefer and Yuriy Pylypchuk look at the link between health, and whether or not those with low incomes enroll in SNAP and Medicaid. They find that individuals with diet-sensitive and other chronic conditions are more likely to enroll in SNAP if they are already enrolled in Medicaid. They argue that coordinating measures aimed at improving access to health care, such as the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act with programs like SNAP, would help low-income individuals better manage the burdens of chronic disease

The Medical Care Costs of Obesity: An Instrumental Variables Approach

This paper is the first to use the method of instrumental variables (IV) to estimate the impact of obesity on medical costs in order to address the endogeneity of weight and to reduce the bias from reporting error in weight. Models are estimated using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey for 2000-2005. The IV model, which exploits genetic variation in weight as a natural experiment, yields estimates of the impact of obesity on medical costs that are considerably higher than the correlations reported in the previous literature. For example, obesity is associated with $676 higher annual medical care costs, but the IV results indicate that obesity raises annual medical costs by$2,826 (in 2005 dollars). The estimated annual cost of treating obesity in the U.S. adult non-institutionalized population is $168.4 billion or 16.5% of national spending on medical care. These results imply that the previous literature has underestimated the medical costs of obesity, resulting in underestimates of the cost effectiveness of anti-obesity interventions and the economic rationale for government intervention to reduce obesity-related externalities.

Judicial Application of Ohio\u27s Comparative Negligence Statute

In the case of Wilfong v. Batdorf the Ohio Supreme Court reexamined the issue of the retroactive application of Ohio\u27s comparative negligence statute. Ohio\u27s statute abolishing the defense of contributory negligence in a tort action was passed with an effective date of June 20, 1980, and the court faced the task of deciding whether comparative fault measurements could be used in an action arising prior to the effective date of the statute, but not coming to trial until after the effective date of the act. Previously the court had the opportunity to examine this issue in the case of Viers v. Dunlap, but had there ruled that comparative negligence was a change in substantive rights, hence, could not be given retroactive application under the provisions of the Ohio Constitution. Wilfong overruled Viers, concluding that comparative negligence modified only remedial aspects of a plaintiff\u27s case, is procedural rather than substantive in nature, and its retroactive application is constitutionally permissable

Challenges to Aligning Coordination Technology with Organizations, People, and Processes in Healthcare

Healthcare coordination has proven difficult to achieve, even with new coordination technologies such as shared electronic health records. Successful coordination requires alignment of information technology with new organizational structures, reskilled personnel, and reengineering of work processes. We suggest that this is more challenging in the healthcare industry as a result of the need for integrating information across care cycles, payment and regulatory mechanisms, high degree of professional control, failure impact and privacy concerns, and information granularity across the care cycle. We illustrate these challenges with several examples from a qualitative study of the integration of electronic health records between hospital and ambulatory practices.