Comparing the safety of prescription drugs over time is difficult due to the paucity of reliable quantitative measures of drug safety. Both the academic literature and popular press have focused on drug withdrawals as a proxy for breakdowns in the drug safety system. This metric, however, is...

In the United States, drugs are jointly regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration, which oversees premarket clinical trials designed to ensure drug safety and efficacy, and the liability system, which allows patients to sue manufacturers for unsafe drugs. In this paper, we examine the...

Economic theory predicts that individual recycling behavior gravitates toward extremes--either diligent recycling or no recycling at all. Using a nationally representative sample of 3,158 bottled water users, this article finds that this prediction is borne out for consumer recycling of plastic...

Since the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act (1897) and the Sherman Act (1890), regulation and antitrust have operated as competing mechanisms to control competition. Regulation produced cross-subsidies and favors to special interests, but specified prices and rules of mandatory dealing....

In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) agency is responsible for regulating the safety and efficacy of biopharmaceutical drug products. Furthermore, the FDA is tasked with speeding new medical innovations to market. These two missions create an inherent tension within the...

In this article, we show that a small innovation in inspection technology can make substantial differences in inspection outcomes. For restaurant hygiene inspections, the state of Florida has introduced a handheld electronic device, the portable digital assistant (PDA), which reminds inspectors...

Meta-regression estimates of the value of a statistical life (VSL) controlling for publication selection bias yield bias-corrected estimates of VSL that are higher for labor market studies using the more recent Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI) data. These results are borne out by the...

We consider the effect of legal access to alcohol on student achievement. We first estimate the effect using an RD design but argue that this approach is not well suited to the research question in our setting. Our preferred approach instead exploits the longitudinal nature of the data,...

We examine whether adult alcohol consumption and traffic fatalities are associated with the legal drinking environment when a person was between the ages of 18 and 20. We find that moving from an environment in which a person was never allowed to drink legally to one in which a person could...

Building on an idea in Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003), this article investigates the application of synthetic control methods to comparative case studies. We discuss the advantages of these methods and apply them to study the effects of Proposition 99, a large-scale tobacco control program that...