Most governments in the world including the United States prohibit prostitution. Given these types of laws rarely change and are fairly uniform across regions, our knowledge about the impact of decriminalizing sex work is largely conjectural. We exploit the fact that a Rhode Island District...

Adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa have some of the highest rates of intimate partner violence across the globe. This paper evaluates the impact of a randomized controlled trial that offers females a goal setting activity to improve their sexual and reproductive health outcomes and offers their...

A large body of research has explored the importance of auction design and information structure for auction outcomes. Much less work has considered the importance of the auction process. For example, in many auctions, auctioneers are present and can impact the process of the auction by varying...

This paper evaluates the evidence regarding teens' sexual activity and birth control use with an emphasis on the contribution of economic analysis. For non-economists, teen sexual activity is often considered spontaneous and irrational, and pregnancies are viewed as mistakes.' Alternatively an...

This paper examines the impact of induced abortion on birth outcomes by treating abortion as an endogenous input into the production of infant health. To gauge the direct and indirect effect of abortion, three measures of infant health are considered simultaneously: the neonatal sortality rate,...

We provide the first quasi-experimental evidence on the relationship between cigarette taxes and sexual minority adult smoking by studying individuals in same-sex households (a large share of whom are in same-sex romantic relationships) from the 1996-2018 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance...

We test the effectiveness of an entertainment education TV series, MTV Shuga, aimed at providing information and changing attitudes and behaviors related to HIV/AIDS. Using a simple model we show that "edutainment" can work through an individual or a social channel. We conducted a randomized...

Economic growth and development have improved human health in many regions, while sub-Saharan Africa continues to lag behind. Economic theory and the existing empirical evidence suggest that development may not generate large reductions in the leading cause of adult mortality in the region,...

We study the behavioral changes due to marijuana consumption on fertility and its key mechanisms, as opposed to physiological changes. We can employ several large proprietary data sets, including the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Nielsen Retail Scanner database, as well as the...

We use data from The National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health to estimate effects of adolescent girls' overweight on their propensity to engage in risky sexual behavior. We estimate single equation, two-stage, and sibling fixed-effects models and find that overweight or obese teenage...