Three essays on applied health economics: Obesity, smoking behavior, and mortality from acute myocardial infarctions

Chapter 1: Using data from across the US, I find that as the number of communities adopting workplace smoking bans in a state increases or an entire state goes smoke-free, there are significant reductions in fatal myocardial infarctions among those ages 25-54 in the state. The results of existing epidemiological studies that observe a smoking ban- heart attack link in local areas are confirmed on a national scale using cross-state variation in smoking ban coverage.;Chapter 2: In this study, I test for effects of fast-food availability on weight status across the income distribution. The endogeneity of the restaurant mix is properly controlled for in this paper, and the effect of a rise in relative fast-food availability is shown to be about twice as large as what a "naive" OLS regression without instruments would have found it to be. Interestingly, the link between fast food and weight is far from being a low-income phenomenon. In fact, people in the upper half of the income distribution seem to respond slightly stronger to a rise in away-from-home food options once endogeneity is corrected for. Public policies designed to reduce overweight or obesity prevalence amongst lower-income people may, consequently, not prove to be fruitful if the intervention targets the supply side of unhealthy foods exclusively.;Chapter 3: This paper examines the possible link between rising obesity rates and smoking behavior in the US by employing an instrumental variable approach. I use data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (1990-2007), augmented with data on city, county and state smoking bans from Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights and state-level cigarette tax rates from the Tax Burden on Tobacco reports. Treating smoking behavior as an endogenous variable in a 2-Stage-Least-Squares model of BMI, I find that clean indoor air laws covering bars have the expected effect on smoking status while workplace bans and cigarette taxes do not. Jointly, the association between the different tobacco control policies and smoking status is significant, however, contributing to an increase in the weight gap between smokers and nonsmokers of almost 2 pounds when compared to outcomes of traditional OLS regression models.