Researchers are often interested in estimating the causal effect of some treatment on individual criminality. For example, two recent relatively prominent papers have attempted to estimate the respective direct effects of marriage and gang participation on individual criminal activity. One...

We study smoking persistence in ten countries using data from the European Community Household Panel. Such persistence may be due to true state dependence but may also reflect individual unobserved heterogeneity. We distinguish between the two by using semi-parametric dynamic panel data methods...

Objective – To identify the extent to which differences between Inuit and other residents of Canada’s North in a set of health behaviors and health service use related to cancer incidence and diagnosis can be accounted for by demographic, socio-economic and geographic factors. Study Design...

During the postwar period German states pursued policies to increase the share of young Germans obtaining a university entrance diploma (Abitur) by building more academic track schools, but the timing of educational expansion differed between states. This creates exogenous variation in the...

The existence of a healthy immigrant effect – where immigrants are on average healthier than the native-born – is now a well accepted phenomenon. There are many competing explanations for this phenomenon including health screening by recipient countries, healthy behaviour prior to migration...

This paper investigates the short-term effects of public smoking bans on individual smoking behavior. In 2007 and 2008, state-level smoking bans were gradually introduced in all of Germany's sixteen federal states. We exploit this variation in the timing of state bans to identify the effect that...

This paper estimates a model of dynamic intrahousehold investment behavior which incorporates family fixed effects and child endowment heterogeneity. This framework is applied to large American and British survey data on birth outcomes, with focus on the effects of antenatal parental smoking and...