Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/97324
Year of Publication: 
2014
Series/Report no.: 
Working Paper Series: Business and Law No. 03
Publisher: 
Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, Frankfurt Research Institute for Business and Law, Frankfurt a. M.
Abstract: 
Recently prostate and ovarian cancer has been related to milk consumption. However, existing observational studies based on country level data do not attempt to identify causal effects since they are only based on simple cross-sectional analyses. This paper takes a step toward estimating of causal effects of milk consumption on cancer by applying panel econometric models and by using the within-country variation of the mortality rates and food consumption instead of the between-country variation in a panel of up to 50 countries for 1990 to 2008. Possible methodological problems arising from omitted variables (confounding factors), heterogeneity, and outliers are carefully discussed and a wide range of recent panel econometric estimators are applied. The results indicate fairly well that milk consumption increases both the mortality rate of prostate cancer as well as the mortality rate of ovarian cancer. The estimated effects are also important in quantitative terms, i.e., a reduction in the consumption of milk products can reduce the number of people dying of prostate and ovarian cancer appreciably. Furthermore, the consumption of other animal food products as well as sugar seems to be harmful. For the mortality rate of ovarian cancer we find that total calories intake increases the mortality rate too.
Subjects: 
Panel Econometrics
GMM
Dynamic Panel Data Methods
Fixed-Effects
Quantile Regression
Prostate Cancer
Ovarian Cancer
Cross-Country Analysis
Causal Effect
Quantile Regression
Bayesian Model Averaging
Extreme Bounds Analysis
JEL: 
C33
Q18
I19
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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