To shed new light on the role private profit incentives play in promoting public health, in this paper we conduct an empirical study of the impact of pharmaceutical industry advertising on smoking cessation decisions. We link survey data on individual smokers with an archive of magazine...

We examine the effect of direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of drug treatment on an important health habit, physical exercise. By learning the existence of a new drug treatment via DTCA, rational consumers may become careless about maintaining healthy lifestyles. Using the National Health...

A model is developed where traditional and digital advertising finance the provision of free media goods and affect price competition. The economy is not efficient. Media goods are under provided. Additionally, there is too much advertising when ads cannot be perfectly directed toward potential...

The two components of the advertising industry - the creative sector that develops and produces messages, and the communications sector that transmits messages via various media - have each been greatly affected by advances in creative design and communications technologies. As the media...

Existing theories of media competition imply that advertisers will pay a lower price in equilibrium to reach consumers who multi-home across competing outlets. We generalize and extend this theoretical result and test it using data from television and social media advertising. We find that...

We study the effect of price caps on the provision of costly effort by pharmaceutical firms using variation in drug discounts generated by a price regulation program that allows eligible hospitals to purchase outpatient drugs at steep discounts. These discounts directly affect drug...

We study the effects of social media political advertising by randomizing subsets of 36,906 Facebook users and 25,925 Instagram users to have political ads removed from their news feeds for six weeks before the 2020 US presidential election. We show that most presidential ads were targeted...

This paper examines the relationship between extreme socioeconomic disadvantage and poor health by providing the first detailed and accurate picture of mortality patterns among people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. Our analyses center on 140,000 people who were sheltered or unsheltered...

While state incarceration policies have received much attention in research on the causes of mass incarceration in the U.S., their roles in shaping population health and health disparities remain largely unknown. We examine the impacts of two signature state incarceration policies adopted during...

Effective information sharing is critical for the success of organizations and governments. Because information that is easy to access is more likely to be adopted, leaders often minimize friction in information delivery. However, one type of friction may increase engagement: piquing curiosity...