This paper adopts a labor market economics perspective to understanding the crisis of health care professionals in Africa. Five challenges resulting from this crisis are identified: a production challenge, an underutilization challenge, a distributional challenge, a performance challenge, and a...

Mexico's 'soda tax' has been predicted to reduce average weights by two to four pounds, based on extant estimates of an own-price elasticity of quantity demand for soda of between −1.0 and −1.3. These estimates ignore consumer responses on the quality margin and correlated measurement...

This paper examines the performance of minimum wage legislation in Kenya, both in terms of its coverage and enforcement as well as in terms of their implications for wages and employment. Our findings based on the 1998/99 labor force data - the last labor force survey available - indicate that...

This research evaluates the impact of electronic monitoring as an alternative to prison on reoffending. Leveraging plausibly exogenous variation in sentencing outcomes generated by quasi- random assignment of judges, we find electronic monitoring reduces reoffending within 24 months by 16...

This paper studies the impact of legal medical marijuana markets on the decision to quit marijuana use. We distinguish between de jure legalization, where dispensaries are legally protected, and de facto legalization, where dispensaries operate in the absence of laws protecting them. Geographic...

In this paper we investigate the effects of delinquency and arrest on school leaving using information on males from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. We use a multivariate mixed proportional hazard framework in order to account for common unobserved confounders and reverse...

Passive smoking is a major public health issue. This paper documents the main risk factors that determine children's exposure to passive smoke, and then uses econometric techniques to provide a new economic quantification of the impact of this exposure on child health. Such information is...

We study the impact of early cannabis use on the school to work transition of young men. Our empirical approach accounts for common unobserved confounders that jointly affect selection into cannabis use and the transition from school to work using a multivariate mixed proportional hazard...

This research provides the first evidence on the impacts of waiting times for treatment for a substance use disorder (SUD). Using rich linked administrative information from Norway, we study the impact of waiting time on health-care utilization, employment and crime for patients who enter...

We examine the effects of fast-food restaurant advertising on television on the body composition of adolescents as measured by percentage body fat (PBF) and to assess the sensitivity of these effects to using conventional measures of youth obesity based on body-mass index (BMI). We merge...