Obesity poses lots of health risks in both developing and developed countries. One thing that remains unclear is the relationship between family income and weight gain. This paper explores the relationship between family income and Body Mass Index (BMI) given variations in individual choice towards basic consumption and life quality improvement consumption as income increases. We use a nationally representative longitudinal data from China, the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), to estimate the relationship between income and weight gain. We conduct both cross sectional and panel data analysis to study the causal effects of family income on weight development. Unlike other literature that found inverse relationship between prevalence of obesity and family income in developing countries, in this paper, we find that BMI will first increase with family income at a decreasing rate, and then decrease which suggests that the group of middle class may suffer the high risk of being overweight and obese.

In this paper, we use regression models to analyze and compare the effect of a change in real minimum wage on employment rate both in China (the largest emerging market) and in the United States (the largest developed country). The longitudinal data we use is from 2000 to 2016 published by both countries. After controlling for unobserved heterogeneities by using the fixed effect estimations, the results show a significant and negative correlation between real minimum wage and employment rate in both countries, with a smaller and weaker effect of real minimum wage in China. It indicates that employment in China is less responsive to a change in minimum wage because of its unique economic system. In addition, We find that the effect of minimum wage on employment rate turns into insignificant in recent years in China since 2008, which is the opposite of and different from the situation in the U.S.