Poverty & Obesity: how poverty influences food choices

Enduring Influences of Childhood Poverty

Poverty is a common experience for children growing up in the United States. Although only about one in five children are in poverty each year, roughly one in three will spend at least one year living in a poor household. Child poverty is a significant concern to researchers and policymakers because early childhood poverty is linked to a multitude of worse outcomes, including reduced academic a...

The Geography of Poverty and Nutrition: Food Deserts and Food Choices Across the United States

We study and quantify the variation in healthful consumption habits across income brackets in the United States. Using a detailed grocery shopping database, we document a positive nutrition-income gradient: the highest-income quartile of households buy groceries that are 0.25 standard deviations more healthful than the lowest-income quartile. We then study the underlying mechanisms leading to t...

How the poverty of stimulus solves the poverty of stimulus

The logical problem of language acquisition is the problem every child is facing when acquiring the grammar of its native language: it has too little evidence to uniquely determine which is the target grammar from the set of all grammars that would in principle be possible. The basic intuition that the grammars of natural languages are not learnable from available evidence is supported with a s...

Poverty, Policy and Place: How Poverty and Policies to Alleviate Poverty Are Shaped by Local Characteristics

Poverty Profile without Poverty

This paper explores poverty trends in Romania from 1994 to 1997. It finds no reduction in poverty. Regional and other types of poverty decompositions are presented. The poverty profile relies on tests of stochastic dominance. This approach avoids the problem that poverty comparisons may not be robust to the subjective choice of a poverty line. In addition the use of tests of stochastic dominanc...