Sexual activities between consenting adults of the same sex are still criminalized in more than one third of the countries in the world despite a global wave of decriminalization in the past sixty years. This paper empirically investigates the effect of sex ratios, i.e. relative number of men to...

This paper investigates how Confucianism affects individual decision making in Taiwan and in China. We found that Chinese subjects in our experiments became less accepting of Confucian values, such that they became significantly more risk loving, less loss averse, and more impatient after being...

This paper explores the determinants of individuals’ psychological and psychosocial health using recent Health Survey for England data. We find evidence that our dependent variables, defined, respectively, from the GHQ12 and Perceived Social Support scores, are negatively related to household...

This paper investigates the driving forces behind informal sanctions in cooperation games and the extent to which theories of fairness and reciprocity capture these forces. We find that cooperators’ punishment is almost exclusively targeted towards the defectors but the latter also impose a...

To date, 16 states have passed medical marijuana laws, yet very little is known about their effects. Using state-level data, we examine the relationship between medical marijuana laws and a variety of outcomes. Legalization of medical marijuana is associated with increased use of marijuana among...

This paper examines the impact of a reduction in the legal drinking age in New Zealand from 20 to 18 on alcohol use, and alcohol-related hospitalisations and vehicular accidents among teenagers. We use both a difference-in-differences approach and a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to...

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether excessive parental alcohol consumption leads to a reduction of child welfare. To this end, we analyse whether alcohol consumption decreases time spent by parents looking after their children and working. Using the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring...

It is now common to use the individual's self-assessed-health-status (SAHS) as a measure of health. The use of SAHS is supported by numerous studies that show that SAHS is a better predictor of mortality and morbidity than medical records. The 2011 wave of the rich Survey of Health Aging and...

This paper examines the effects of alcohol consumption on employment and wages for males and females in Russia. Both cross sectional and fixed-effects models are estimated utilizing data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey. The results from the models that do not control for...