Estimating the efficacy of seat belt use is important as compensating risk-taking or "offsetting behaviour" by drivers may attenuate benefits from vehicle safety regulation. However, evidence on partial-offsetting behaviour from previous studies may simply reflect simultaneity bias, as...

Donohue and Levitt (2001) attribute over half the current decline in U.S. crime rates to the legalization of abortion. I contribute to the literature by using provincial Canadian data, which permits the segregation of trends in teenage abortions from general abortion rates. This distinction is...

We evaluate the effects of higher beer prices on gonorrhea, chlamydia, and teen pregnancy rates by pooling data across Canadian provinces over time. Higher real beer prices are significantly correlated with a reduction in both gonorrhea and chlamydia rates with price elasticities ranging from...

Some recent policy initiatives aimed at preserving the market share of smaller gasoline retailers have been proposed in Canada. These measures are grounded in the belief that strengthening such firms will enhance competition and result in lower prices, which is consistent with the implications...

Most research using cross-country data find income elasticities with respect to health expenditure equal to or exceeding unity. These results might be confounded due to omitted variables bias as well the presence of unobserved country and year specific determinants of per capita health...

A decline in drinking and driving could be due to stricter penalties as well as enhanced media publicity, which increases public knowledge of drinking and driving laws. However, most research fails to control for the effects of increased media coverage. Employing a unique data set consisting of...

There is little consensus on whether higher retail gasoline prices in Canada are the result of international crude oil price fluctuations or local market power exercised by large vertically-integrated firms. I find that although both increasing local market concentration and higher average...