We study the effect of recent legalization of recreational marijuana use (RMLs) in the United States on Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income claiming, proxied by new applications and new benedficiaries, over the period 2001 to 2019. We combine administrative...

Informal care is the largest source of long-term care for elderly, surpassing home health care and nursing home care. By definition, informal care is unpaid. It remains a puzzle why so many adult children give freely of their time. Transfers of time to the older generation may be balanced by...

Older adults have the highest rates of many health conditions for which medical marijuana may be effective in moderating symptoms and are at elevated risk of reducing labor supply due to poor health. Surprisingly little is known about how this group responds to medical marijuana laws. We provide...

Excess body weight or body fat hinders performance of military duties. As a result, the U.S. military has weight-for-height and percent body fat standards for enlistment. This paper estimates the number and percent of military-age civilians who meet, and do not meet, the current active duty...

Each year, approximately 10,000 individuals die in alcohol-impaired traffic crashes in the United States, while psychoactive drugs are involved in 20% of all fatal traffic crashes. In this study, we investigate whether state-specific parity laws for substance use disorder (SUD) treatment have...

In this study we examine the importance of assimilation and ethnic enclave residence for smoking outcomes among United States immigrants. We draw data on over 140,000 immigrants from the Current Population Survey Tobacco Use Supplements between 1995 and 2011. Several patterns emerge from our...

Previous economic research shows that recessions lead to worsening substance abuse. In this paper we study the effect of recessions on admissions to specialty substance abuse treatment using administrative data between 1992 and 2015. Using data from Treatment Episode Data Set and a...

A small but rapidly growing percentage of the U.S. population uses e-cigarettes. Policymakers, especially the FDA, are concerned about their public health impact and thus are contemplating regulations. We provide empirical evidence to inform such policy choices. Specifically, we examine how the...

The human capital construct is deep in the bones of economics and finds reference by many classical economists, even if they did not use the phrase. The term “human capital,” seldom mentioned in economics before the 1950s, increased starting in the 1960s and blossomed in the 1990s. The...

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a large and immediate drop in employment among US workers, along with major expansions of unemployment insurance and work from home. We use Current Population Survey and Social Security application data to study employment among older adults and their...