This study investigates the impact of food price on obesity, by exploring the co-occurrence of obesity growth with relative food price reduction between 1976 and 2001. Analyses control for female labor participation and metropolitan outlet densities that might affect body weight. Both the first-difference and fixed effects approaches provide consistent evidence suggesting that relative food pri...

Immigration and Housing Rents in American Cities Is there a local economic impact of immigration? Immigration pushes up rents and housing values in US destination cities. The positive association of rent growth and immigrant inflows is pervasive in time series for all metropolitan areas. I use instrumental variables based on a “shift-share” of national levels of immigration into metropolitan ar...

provided helpful comments on a previous draft. The authors thank Ethan Lewis for providing programs to create metropolitan areas from county and PUMA codes for the 1980, 1990, and 2000 Censuses. Jay Liao assisted with the County Business Patterns data and Amanda Bailey assisted with annual trends from the Current Population Survey.

The managed care backlash led many to predict the demise of health maintenance organizations (HMOs). This paper examines trends in HMO enrollment in all metropolitan communities from 1994 to 2000 to identify factors that led to diminishing enrollment in the backlash era and circumstances in which HMOs maintained or expanded their presence. We use a database constructed from a wide variety of so...

This paper investigates the relationship between professional sports franchises and venues and real per capita personal income in 37 standard metropolitan statistical areas in the United States over the period 1969 to 1994. Our empirical framework accounts for the entry and departure of professional football, basketball, and baseball franchises; the construction of arenas and stadia; and other ...

The author earlier conducted a research, attempting to make two models, one for understanding, monitoring and describing settlement patterns in metropolitan regions, dependant primarily on remotely sensed data; and the second, for predicting settlement patterns in such regions, using National Capital Region (NCR), of Delhi, India, as a case study. As part of the model, a transferable approach o...

BACKGROUND Extreme heat events (EHEs) are increasing in frequency in large U.S. cities and are responsible for a greater annual number of climate-related fatalities, on average, than any other form of extreme weather. In addition, low-density, sprawling patterns of urban development have been associated with enhanced surface temperatures in urbanized areas. OBJECTIVES In this study. we examin...