Recent research has suggested that one of the important consequences of teen drinking is reduced scholastic achievement and that state excise taxes on beer and minimum legal drinking ages (MLDA) as policy instruments can have a positive impact on educational attainment. But there is reason to...

The historical pattern of the demographic transition suggests that fertility declines follow mortality declines, followed by a rise in human capital accumulation and economic growth. The HIV/AIDS epidemic threatens to reverse this path. A recent paper by Young (2005), however, suggests that...

There is widespread and longstanding agreement that life expectancy and income are positively correlated. However, it has proven much more difficult to establish a causal relationship since income and health are jointly determined. We use a major change in the Social Security law as exogenous...

This study uses within-state variation in taxes over the 1989-1992 time period to test whether maternal smoking and birth outcomes are responsive to higher state cigarette taxes. Data on the outcomes of interest are taken from the Natality Detail files, generating a sample of roughly 10.5...

Using country- and region-level data, I investigate the effect of HIV/AIDS on fertility in Africa during 1985-2000. Results differ depending on the variation used and the estimation method. Between estimates that exploit cross-sectional variation suggest a positive significant effect of HIV/AIDS...

Young (2005) argues that HIV related population declines reinforced by the fertility response to the epidemic will lead to higher capital-labor ratios and to higher per capita incomes in the affected countries of Africa. Using household level data on fertility from South Africa and relying on...

We examine the role of changing mortality in explaining the rise of retirement over the course of the 20th century. We construct a model in which individuals make labor/leisure choices over their lifetimes subject to uncertainty about their date of death. In an environment in which mortality is...

As health care consumes a growing share of national income in the U.S., the demand for better estimates regarding both the benefits and the costs of new health care treatments is likely to increase. Estimating these effects with observational data is difficult given the endogeneity of treatment...

Federal and state laws passed in the late 1990 increased considerably postpartum stays for newborns. Using all births in California over the 1995-2001 period, 2SLS estimates suggest that for the average newborn impacted by the law, increased treatment intensity had modest and statistically...

Many studies find that households increase their consumption after the receipt of expected income payments, a result inconsistent with the life-cycle/permanent income hypothesis. Consumption can increase adverse health events, such as traffic accidents, heart attacks and strokes. In this paper,...