Essays on the costs and health consequences of food

This dissertation examines the market imperfections affecting child health, identifying and quantifying the potential negative externalities of agricultural production and food processing on American children's health. During the past several decades, Americans have enjoyed a large expansion of the food supply combined with greatly lowered real food prices. During this period, many childhood chronic diseases, including obesity, asthma, and learning disorders, have increased dramatically. Chronic diseases are among the most prevalent and costly of all health problems in the United States.; Environmental factors---possibly in conjunction with genetic predispositions---may be primarily responsible for the increase of these diseases. In this dissertation, to advance our understanding of the health consequences of food, I test one unified hypothesis: does agricultural production and food processing impact children's health?; The first essay examines the relationship between the intensification of processed foods and the increased prevalence of overweight children in the United States. What has been largely overlooked thus far is that food has become increasingly more intensely processed. I characterize processed foods with energy density and the amount of unidentified residuals in the food, including food additives. I find that higher energy density and residuals in food increase a child's weight and his/her chance of becoming overweight.; The second essay estimates the impact of pesticides on children's cognitive and physical health. Among Hispanic children in the United States, I find that exposure to pesticides, either directly (through farming or pesticide production) or indirectly (through parental occupational exposure to pesticides), significantly increases the incidence of heart, respiratory, and other chronic childhood diseases.; The third essay focuses on organic food, defined as free of pesticides or other chemicals known to impact children's health. I estimate the impact of transaction costs on organic market expansion. I find that transaction costs are important determinants of organic farmers' ability to sell their organic produce to market intermediaries, and that the effect of transaction costs is asymmetrical among two types of organic farmers: those who transitioned from conventional farming and those who did not, and that the former are less affected by transaction costs than the latter.