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Obesity is a significant public health issue. With obesity increasing worldwide, risk factors for obesity need to be better understood and require careful examination. This study aims to examine mental health as a risk factor for obesity using longitudinal data from Australia.

The main identification strategy relies on the recent death of a close friend and a serious injury or illness to a family member as exogenous shocks to mental health.

The authors’ preferred estimates, which account for the endogeneity of mental health, suggest that mental health has a significant negative impact on obesity. This result proves to be robust to a suite of sensitivity checks. Further investigations reveal that poor mental health leads to increased smoking, which also has an effect on obesity.

The study’s findings provide a new perspective on how good mental health helps curb obesity.

This study examines the relationship between goal properties, both at the employee and organizational-level, and the perceived fairness of the performance appraisal system by federal employees.

We describe the theoretical framework regarding goals and employee perceptions of performance appraisal fairness. We then develop and test four hypotheses, exploring the relationships among variables using five years of the FEVS data. To strengthen the research design, we created an agency-level dataset, by calculating agency-level averages for all the covariates. Instead of examining 500,000 federal employees each year, we are examining 80 federal agencies. Creating a panel dataset at the agency level allows us to make stronger statements about causality than using cross-sectional data.

This study finds a significant positive relationship between goal setting factors and employees' perceived fairness of performance appraisals: perceived employee-level goal difficulty and perceived organizational-level goal specificity at the agency level. The study results show that certain control variables, such as intrinsic motivation, play important roles in predicting public employees' perceived fairness of performance appraisals. Federal employees who have a higher level of intrinsic motivation show a more positive perception toward performance appraisal fairness. The appropriate use of extrinsic rewards and intrinsic motivation, combined with effective goal setting strategies in public organizations, may enhance public employees' perceived fairness of performance appraisal systems.

This study used the FEVS, necessitating the reduction of the sample size to agency level averages to create a panel dataset. Also, this study was limited to federal agencies in the United States, so research results may lack generalizability.

This paper fulfills an identified need to avoid cross-sectional research design and leverage longitudinal panel data.