Abstract
This thesis examines the relationship between obesity and its related health risks. This analysis accounts for the impacts of economic, socio-demographic, and lifestyle and behavioral factors on five obesity related mortality outcomes. The data includes all 50 U.S. States from 1995 to 2004. While most of the previous literature focuses on broader measures of mortality, such as infant mortality and years of life expectancy, this thesis uses more specific measures to identify if the same methodology can be appropriately applied. In the specification with two-way fixed effects, I find that obesity significantly increases rates of deaths from colon cancer and diabetes. But surprisingly, obesity does not significantly affect deaths from heart disease, blood pressure or stroke. Results also show that both time and state-fixed effects are appropriate, but inclusion of the state-fixed effects is more important. The age variables are also shown to be the most important determinants among all that were examined. In whole, the variables used may be too general, and important factors may be missing for each specific mortality outcome, which implies that the commonality of obesity and the same specification may not be appropriate for each of these mortality outcomes.