In this paper, we present estimates of the effect of alcohol taxes on employment, hours of work per week, and wages. These are reduced form estimates derived from a structural model linking alcohol use to labor market outcomes. The reduced form estimates are meaningful in two ways: first, they...

Basic economic theory suggests that health insurance coverage may cause a reduction in prevention activities, but empirical studies have yet to provide much evidence to support this prediction. However, in other insurance contexts that involve adverse health events, evidence of ex ante moral...

This study uses the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) and the National Comorbidity Survey (NCS) to explore the causal relationship between alcohol abuse (binge drinking and clinically defined alcohol use disorders) and suicide attempts among youth. We use an empirical approach that allows one to...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the causal impact of alcohol and illicit drug use on suicidal behaviors among college students. Every year, more American youth die from suicide than from all leading natural causes of death combined. Substance use has been identified as a leading risk...

The minimum wage has increased in multiple states over the past three decades. We examine the impact of the state minimum wage on infant health. Using data on the universe of births in the US over 24 years, we find that an increase in the minimum wage is associated with an increase in birth...

Previous studies, by relying on nationally representative surveys, have overlooked the important fact that use of addictive substances is not uniformly distributed; subgroups of hardcore users account for most of the drug consumption. This study employs the Drug Use Forecasting system to analyze...

This paper estimates the empirical relationship between the prices of cocaine and heroin and objective indicators of use. The set of outcomes is drug related hospital emergency department admissions where cocaine and heroin are cited, for 21 large U.S. metropolitan areas. These outcomes are...

In this study, I examine the effect of drug use on poverty. The main objective of the paper is to provide descriptive empirical information about the relationship between drug use and poverty, and to explore, in a preliminary fashion, the question of whether drug use causes poverty. Toward this...

Drug use and welfare are two serious social problems that have received widespread public attention. Recently, it has been suggested that illicit drug use is a major cause of welfare, although there is only anecdotal evidence to support such a claim. This paper provides the first systematic...

In this paper, I examine the relationship between sibling sex composition and educational achievement. First, I replicate the study of Butcher and Case (1994) using data on a more recent birth cohort. Contrary to the findings of that study, I find basically no effect of sibling sex composition...