We investigate how changes in federal and state minimum wages affect body mass index and the probability of obesity using data from the 1990 through 2008 waves of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. After controlling for unobserved trends at the state level we find that, in contrast...

We explore the effect of e-cigarette taxes enacted in eight states and two large counties on e-cigarette prices, e-cigarette sales, and sales of other tobacco products. We use the Nielsen Retail Scanner data from 2011 to 2017, comprising approximately 35,000 retailers nationally. We calculate a...

We estimate effects of e-cigarette taxes enacted in eight states and two large counties on e-cigarette prices, e-cigarette sales, and sales of other tobacco products. We use Nielsen Retail Scanner data from 2011 to 2017, comprising approximately 35,000 retailers nationally. We develop a method...

We investigate how risky health behaviors and self-reported health vary with the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and during stock market crashes. Because stock market indices are leading indicators of economic performance, this research contributes to our understanding of the macro-economic...

A motivation for increasing health insurance coverage is to improve health outcomes for impacted populations. However, health insurance coverage may alternatively increase risky health behaviors due to ex ante moral hazard, and past research on this issue has led to mixed conclusions. This paper...

We analyze the Nielsen Homescan Consumer Panel to estimate the effects of tobacco policies on tobacco-related purchases using within-household variation. We also match purchases to cigarette contents from NHANES. Higher cigarette taxes reduce cigarette purchases and increase smoking cessation...

Recent proposals argue that a fast food tax may be an effective policy lever for reducing population weight. Although there is growing evidence for a negative association between fast food prices and weight among adolescents, less is known about adults. That any measured relationship to date is...

In this paper, we investigate to what extent and in what ways conditions related to the recession of 2007-2008 reduced fatal crashes. We hypothesize that the reduction in fatal automobile accidents operates through both the quantity of driving and changes in behaviors associated with driving....

For those looking to design policies that mitigate the deleterious consequences of alcohol abuse, understanding how consumer demand for alcohol responds to changes in the local economic conditions is of great importance. We use high-frequency purchase data from a large panel of U.S. households...

Introduction: E-cigarette taxes have been enacted by 30 states through April 2020. E-cigarette tax schema vary, in contrast to cigarette taxes in the United States that are levied almost exclusively as excise taxes per pack. Some states use excise taxes on liquid and containers, others ad...