How do sudden, large wealth losses affect mental health? Most prior studies of the causal effects of material well-being on health use identification strategies involving income increases; these studies as well as prior research on stock market accumulations may not inform this question if the...

This paper assesses the long-run toll taken by a large-scale technological disaster on welfare, well-being and mental health. We estimate the causal effect of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe after 20 years by linking geographic variation in radioactive fallout to respondents of a nationally...

This paper investigates the impact of the public smoking ban which came into effect in Italy on January 2005 on individual smoking behaviour. Current empirical evidence supports the existence of a negative effect of the Italian ban on smoking prevalence and consumption in the general population....

This paper explores different empirical strategies to examine the effect of cost sharing for prescription drugs in some dimensions of medication-related quality, namely the probability of inappropriate prescription drug use among United States seniors. Using data from 1996 to 2005, we explore...

This paper uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate the impact of the minimum legal tobacco purchase age (MLTPA) laws on smoking behavior among young adults. Using data from the confidential version of National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997 Cohort), which contains information on...

The perception of disease risks and risky health behaviors are closely associated. In this paper, we investigate the accuracy of disease risk perceptions among obese individuals. We compare subjective risk perceptions for various diseases elicited in the American Life Panel (ALP) to...

Cross-country regressions suggest that urbanization and FDI are important drivers of growth. However, it is not clear that primacy eventually hurts growth performance. Since it is tough to interpret cross-country growth regressions, we provide detailed evidence on the determinants of outward FDI...

One important goal of this study is to develop a methodology of inference for a widely used Cliff-Ord type spatial model containing spatial lags in the dependent variable, exogenous variables, and the disturbance terms, while allowing for unknown heteroskedasticity in the innovations. We first...

In this paper we specify a linear Cliff and Ord-type spatial model. The model allows for spatial lags in the dependent variable, the exogenous variables, and disturbances. The innovations in the disturbance process are assumed to be heteroskedastic with an unknown form. We formulate a multi-step...

An emerging literature on the geography of bohemians argues that a region’s lifestyle and cultural amenities explain, at least partly, the unequal distribution of highly qualified people across space, which in turn, explains geographic disparities in economic growth. However, to date, there...