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We utilize the variations in home appliance adoption generated by China’s Home Appliances Going to the Countryside policy to isolate the actual effects of household technology on weight and health outcomes. Using difference-in-differences and instrumental variable approaches, we find that the policy-induced technological change has increased the probability of being obese and the incidence of being sick or injured for rural women but has had no impact on rural men. Our results also indicate that household technology has increased female labor force participation but has decreased women’s overall levels of energy expenditure.

Childhood obesity is an escalating problem around the world that is especially detrimental as its effects carry on into adulthood. To estimate the effects of television fast-food restaurant advertising on children and adolescents with respect to being overweight, this paper employs the 1979 ChildﾖYoung Adult National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to estimate the effects of television fast-food restaurant advertising on children and adolescents with respect to being overweight. A ban on these advertisements would reduce the number of overweight children ages 3ﾖ11 in a fixed population by 18 percent and would reduce the number of overweight adolescents ages 12ﾖ18 by 14 percent. The elimination of the tax deductibility of this type of advertising would produce smaller declines of between 5 and 7 percent in these outcomes but would impose lower costs on children and adults who consume fast food in moderation because positive information about restaurants that supply this type of food would not be completely banned from television.

The productivity of firms has been shown to decline after breaks in production. The literature suggests that one cause of this decline is the depreciation of human capital of individual workers. We examine the productivity of cardiac surgeons and hospitals to determine whether the length of or level of task repetition prior to breaks in production affects the productivity of individuals. We find decreases in surgeon productivity that are directly attributable to the length of the break between surgeries, with little evidence that this effect is mitigated by the level of task repetition prior to the break.