This study investigates whether models of forward-looking behavior explain the observed patterns of heavy drinking and smoking of men in late middle age in the Health and Retirement Study better than myopic models. We develop and estimate a sequence of nested models which differ by their degree...

Using a new comprehensive survey of adults in large U.S. media markets we show that minority and low-skill individuals, who are heavily exposed to shocks to the local economy, typically have stronger preferences for and stronger ex- posure to local news than high-skill and white individuals. At...

We study the decentralization of liquor policies in the Post-Prohibition Era, which is the most famous natural experiment ever conducted with respect to policy decentralization in the U.S. Our empirical analysis exploits a unique feature of this policy change, namely that we observe votes of...

This paper applies some of the key insights of dynamic discrete choice models to continuous-time job search models. We propose a novel framework that incorporates preference shocks into search models, resulting in a tight connection between value functions and conditional choice probabilities....

Many studies have estimated the cost of smoking. In recent years, such estimates have been widely used in litigation against the tobacco companies. Both longitudinal and cross-sectional methods have been used. On balance, the longitudinal approach, the one used in this study, is much preferable...

We used the first five waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to study three distinct but possibly interrelated phenomena: smoking cessation, changes in alcohol consumption, and changes in weight. The HRS is well suited for our study because it contains smoking and drinking behavior...