Intimate partner violence and help-seeking: The role of femicide news.

Exploiting high-frequency data from the Italian anti-violence helpline, police reports of domestic abuse and maltreatments, and a unique geolocalized dataset on killings of women, we show that the news coverage of a femicide triggers an increase in help-seeking behavior. The effect is detectable in the period following the news and in the province where the femicide has occurred. Additionally, help-seeking increases more when the general interest and news coverage are higher. These findings are consistent with a model in which femicide news increase expectations about future intimate partner violence in case no action is taken. Our results imply that recurrent information campaigns and public discussion can foster help-seeking from survivors of gender-based violence.

"The better you feel, the harder you fall": Health perception biases and mental health among Chinese adults during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The health risks of the current COVID-19 pandemic, together with the drastic mitigation measures taken in many affected nations, pose an obvious threat to public mental health. To assess predictors of poor mental health in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this study first implements survey-based measures of health perception biases among Chinese adults during the pandemic. Then, it analyzes their relation to three mental health outcomes: life satisfaction, happiness, and depression (as measured by the CES-D). We show that the health overconfidence displayed by approximately 30% of the survey respondents is a clear risk factor for mental health problems; it is a statistically significant predictor of depression and low levels of happiness and life satisfaction. We also document that these effects are stronger in regions that experienced higher numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths. Our results offer clear guidelines for the implementation of effective interventions to temper health overconfidence, particularly in uncontrollable situations like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Resolving the milk addiction paradox.

The milk addiction paradox refers to an empirical finding in which consumption of non-addictive commodities such as milk appears to be consistent with the theory of rational addiction. This paradoxical result seems more likely when consumption is persistent and with aggregate data. Using both simulated and real data, we show that the milk addiction paradox disappears when estimating the data using an AR(1) linear specification that describes the saddle-path solution of the rational addiction model, instead of the canonical AR(2) model. The AR(1) specification is able to correctly discriminate between rational addiction and simple persistence in the data, to test for the main features of rational addiction, and to produce unbiased estimates of the short and long-run elasticity of demand. These results hold both with individual and aggregated data, and they imply that the AR(1) model is a better empirical alternative for testing rational addiction than the canonical AR(2) model.

Biased health perceptions and risky health behaviors-Theory and evidence.

This paper investigates the role of biased health perceptions as a potential driving force of risky health behaviors. We define absolute and relative health perception biases, illustrate their measurement in surveys and provide evidence on their relevance. Next, we decompose the theoretical effect into its extensive and intensive margin: When the extensive margin dominates, people (wrongly) believe they are healthy enough to "afford" unhealthy behavior. Finally, using three population surveys, we provide robust empirical evidence that respondents who overestimate their health are less likely to exercise and sleep enough, but more likely to eat unhealthily and drink alcohol daily.

Non-separable time preferences, novelty consumption and body weight: Theory and evidence from the East German transition to capitalism.

This paper develops a dynamic model to illustrate how diet and body weight change when novel food products become available to consumers. We propose a microfounded test to empirically discriminate between habit and taste formation in intertemporal preferences. Moreover, we show that 'novelty consumption' and endogenous preferences can explain the persistent correlation between economic development and obesity. By empirically studying the German reunification, we find that East Germans consumed more novel Western food and gained more weight than West Germans when a larger variety of food products became readily accessible after the fall of the Wall. The observed consumption patterns suggest that food consumption features habit formation.

Obesity and Smoking: can we Kill Two Birds with one Tax?

The debate on tobacco and fat taxes often treats smoking and eating as independent behaviors. However, the available evidence shows that they are interdependent, which implies that policies against smoking or obesity may have larger scope than expected. To address this issue, we propose a dynamic rational model where eating, smoking, and physical exercise are simultaneous choices that jointly affect body weight and addiction to smoking. Focusing on direct and cross-price effects, we study the impact of tobacco and food taxes, and we show that in both cases a single policy tool can reduce both smoking and body weight. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Demand for Cigarettes as Derived from the Demand for Weight Loss: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation.

This paper offers an economic model of smoking and body weight and provides new empirical evidence on the extent to which the demand for cigarettes is derived from the demand for weight loss. In the model, smoking causes weight loss in addition to having direct utility benefits and direct health consequences. It predicts that some individuals smoke for weight loss and that the practice is more common among those who consider themselves overweight and those who experience greater disutility from excess weight. We test these hypotheses using nationally representative data in which adolescents are directly asked whether they smoke to control their weight. We find that, among teenagers who smoke frequently, 46% of girls and 30% of boys are smoking in part to control their weight. As predicted by the model, this practice is significantly more common among those who describe themselves as too fat and among groups that tend to experience greater disutility from obesity. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for tax policy; specifically, the demand for cigarettes is less price elastic among those who smoke for weight loss, all else being equal. Public health efforts to reduce smoking initiation and encourage cessation may wish to design campaigns to alter the derived nature of cigarette demand, especially among adolescent girls.

Thinness and obesity: a model of food consumption, health concerns, and social pressure.

The increasing concern of the policy maker about eating behaviour has focused on the spread of obesity and on the evidence of people dieting despite being underweight. As the latter behaviour is often attributed to the social pressure to be thin, some governments have already taken actions to ban ultra-thin ideals and models. This paper proposes a theoretical framework to assess whether increasing the ideal body weight is socially desirable, both from a welfare and a health point of view. We first show that being underweight and being overweight are possible outcomes of a rational eating model. Then, assuming that people are heterogeneous in their healthy weights but exposed to the same ideal body weight, we show that increasing the thin ideal weight can be welfare improving, but may exacerbate the obesity epidemic.

A rational eating model of binges, diets and obesity.

This paper addresses the rapid diffusion of obesity and the existence of different individual patterns of food consumption between non-dieters and chronic dieters. I propose a rational eating model where a forward-looking agent optimizes the intertemporal satisfaction from eating, taking into account the cost of changing consumption habits and the negative health consequences of having a non-optimal body weight. Consistent with the evidence, I show that the intertemporal maximization problem leads to a condition of overweightness, and that heterogeneity in the individual relevance of habits in consumption can determine the observed differences in the individual intertemporal patterns of food consumption and body weight. Sufficient conditions for determining when the convergence to the steady state implies oscillations or is monotonic are given. In the former case, the agent optimally alternates diets and binges until the steady state is reached, in the latter a regular intertemporal pattern of food consumption is optimal.

Reward and social valuation deficits following ventromedial prefrontal damage.

Lesion and imaging studies have implicated the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in economic decisions and social interactions, yet its exact functions remain unclear. Here, we investigated the hypothesis that the vmPFC represents the subjective value or desirability of future outcomes during social decision-making. Both vmPFC-damaged patients and control participants acted as the responder in a single-round ultimatum game. To test outcome valuation, we contrasted concrete, immediately available gains with abstract, future ones. To test social valuation, we contrasted interactions with a human partner and those involving a computer. We found that, compared to controls, vmPFC patients substantially reduced their acceptance rate of unfair offers from a human partner, but only when financial gains were presented as abstract amounts to be received later. When the gains were visible and readily available, the vmPFC patients' acceptance of unfair offers was normal. Furthermore, unlike controls, vmPFC patients did not distinguish between unfair offers from a human agent and those from a computerized opponent. We conclude that the vmPFC encodes the expected value of abstract, future goals in a common neural currency that takes into account both reward and social signals in order to optimize economic decision-making.