Students choosing fat-free chocolate milk during school lunch consume more calories, total sugar, protein, minerals and vitamins at lunch.

Objective: To examine how milk consumption varies by milk choice and measure the association of milk choice on the nutritional and energetic content of National School Lunch Program (NSLP) lunches.

Design: An observational plate waste study using the Digital Photography of Foods Method.

Setting: Data were collected from two suburban South Carolina schools in one district during February and March 2013.

Selection and consumption of lunches by National School Lunch Program participants.

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 requires schools participating in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) to offer a variety of healthy food options each day. Using digital photography data collected from two suburban elementary schools in the spring of 2013, we examine NSLP participant's selection and consumption of all five NSLP lunch components ((1) milk, (2) vegetable, (3) fruit, (4) meat/meat alternate (MA), and (5) grain). We use logit regressions to analyze the selection of the various lunch components by race/ethnicity, gender, grade, and household income level.

Screening for a Chronic Disease: A Multiple Stage Duration Model with Partial Observability.

We estimate a dynamic multi-stage duration model to investigate how early detection of diabetes can delay the onset of lower extremity complications and death. We allow for partial observability of the disease stage, unmeasured heterogeneity, and endogenous timing of diabetes screening. Timely diagnosis appears important.

Caregiving and elderly health in Mexico.

Using the National Mexican Health and Aging Study panel dataset, the authors estimate the effect of having informal care on the probability of dying and on the change in elderly health over a two-year period. Three measures of functional health were used: self-reported health, activities of daily living, and instrumental activities of daily living. We develop an empirical strategy that relies on the panel structure of the dataset to sort out the possible correlation between unobservable characteristics that affect both elderly health and an individual's decision to provide informal care.

Maternal Employment, Migration, and Child Development.

We analyze the roles of and interrelationships among school inputs and parental inputs in affecting child development through the specification and estimation of a behavioral model of household migration and maternal employment decisions. We integrate information on these decisions with observations on child outcomes over a 13-year period from the NLSY. We find that the impact of our school quality measures diminish by factors of 2 to 4 after accounting for the fact that families may choose where to live in part based on school characteristics and labor market opportunities.

Determinants of gender differences in health among the elderly in Latin America.

This paper identifies the main gender differences in health and socio-economic characteristics of the elderly in four Latin American cities. Using locally weighted regressions as well as a flexible model specification that treats age non-parametrically, we investigate whether these unadjusted gender gaps in health are due to gender differences in the distribution of age and other explanatory variables. Interestingly, for all cities, the analyses show a gender gap in health in favour of males at each age.

Living arrangements and the role of caregivers among the elderly in Latin America.

Using the SABE(1) data set, this paper describes the support that the elderly receive from family members, siblings, friends and the community where they live in four Latin American cities. It also reports the activities that the elderly do for their family members. In the four distinct cities included in the study, we find similar trends in terms of living arrangements, the role of caregivers and the type of activities that elderly people provide for their family members.

Within- and between-person variation in nutrient intakes of Russian and U.S. children differs by sex and age.

Within- and between-person variation in nutrient intake has been characterized in different adult populations, but little is known of country, age, or sex differences among children. The objectives of this study were as follows: 1) to describe the mean intake, within- and between-individual CV and variance ratios of nutrient intake among children ages 9-18 y old in Russia and the United States in 1996; 2) to compare the age and sex-related differences in nutrient intake variance within and between countries; and 3) to hypothesize about the feasibility of using within-individual variance estimates from one nationally representative sample to adjust the usual intake distributions in another nationally representative sample. Mean intakes of all nutrients except magnesium were significantly higher among U.

A flexible approach for estimating the effects of covariates on health expenditures.

Our estimation strategy uses sequences of conditional probability functions, similar to those used in discrete time hazard rate analyses, to construct a discrete approximation to the density function of an outcome of interest conditional on exogenous explanatory variables. Once the conditional density function has been constructed, we can examine expectations of arbitrary functions of the outcome of interest and evaluate how these expectations vary with observed exogenous covariates. We demonstrate the features and precision of the conditional density estimation method (and compare it to other commonly used methods) through Monte Carlo experiments and an application to health expenditures using the RAND Health Insurance Experiment data.