Are teenage and adult smoking causally related? Recent anti-tobacco policy is predicated on the assumption that preventing teenagers from smoking will ensure that fewer adults smoke, but direct evidence in support of this assumption is scant. Using data from three nationally representative...

Conventional wisdom often holds that the healthcare sector fares better than other sectors during economic downturns. However, little research has examined the relationship between local economic conditions and healthcare employment. Understanding how the healthcare sector responds to economic...

Medical experts have argued forcefully that using cigarettes harms health, prompting the adoption of myriad anti-smoking policies. The association between smoking and mortality may, however, be driven by unobserved factors, making it difficult to discern the underlying long-term causal...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) increased demand for healthcare across the U.S., but it is unclear if or how the supply side has responded to meet this demand. In this paper, we take advantage of plausibly exogenous geographical heterogeneity in the ACA to examine the...

Large in-person gatherings without social distancing and with individuals who have traveled outside the local area are classified as the "highest risk" for COVID-19 spread by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Between August 7 and August 16, 2020, nearly 500,000 motorcycle...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) deems large indoor gatherings without social distancing the "highest risk" activity for COVID-19 contagion. On June 20, 2020, President Donald J. Trump held his first mass campaign rally following the US coronavirus outbreak at the indoor Bank...

Both the White House and state governors have explicitly linked thresholds of reduced COVID-19 case growth to the lifting of statewide shelter-in-place orders (SIPOs). This "hardwired" policy endogeneity creates empirical challenges in credibly isolating the causal effect of lifting a statewide...

Sparked by the killing of George Floyd in police custody, the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests have brought a new wave of attention to the issue of inequality within criminal justice. However, many public health officials have warned that mass protests could lead to a reduction in social...

Shelter in place orders (SIPOs) require residents to remain home for all but essential activities such as purchasing food or medicine, caring for others, exercise, or traveling for employment deemed essential. Between March 19 and April 20, 2020, 40 states and the District of Columbia adopted...

Researchers have focused on the contemporaneous relationship between cigarette taxes and smoking, while the longer-run effects of cigarette taxes have received little attention. Using individual-level panel data from 1970-2017, we estimate the effects of cigarette taxes experienced as a teenager...