In this paper, I use a social interactions framework to detect whether individual smoking decisions are influenced by classmate smoking decisions. There are several large challenges in addressing this question, including the endogeneity of school (and thus classmates) through residential...

Soft drink consumption has been hypothesized as one of the major factors in the growing rates of obesity in the US. Nearly two-thirds of all states currently tax soft drinks using excise taxes, sales taxes, or special exemptions to food exemptions from sales taxes to reduce consumption of this...

This note's aim is to investigate the sensitivity of Christakis and Fowler's claim [Christakis, N., Fowler, J., 2007. The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years. The New England Journal of Medicine 357, 370-379] that obesity has spread through social networks. It is well known...

In this paper, I use nationally representative longitudinal data to examine adolescent depression and educational attainment. First, I examine the individual, family, and community-level determinants of adolescent depression, diagnosis, and treatment. I find that male and minority adolescents...

Drawing on findings from the biomedical literature, this paper introduces the idea that specific exogenously inherited differences in the genetic code between full biological siblings can be used to test within-family estimators and potentially improve our understanding of economic...

This article contributes to a small body of literature that examines empirically the factors affecting the structure of state income taxes. We assume vote-maximizing politicians who are potentially influenced by information spillovers from other states in the spirit of yardstick competition. A...

Large literatures have shown important links between the quantity of completed education and health outcomes on one hand and the quality or selectivity of schooling on a host of adult outcomes, such as wages, on the other hand. However, little research attempts to produce evidence of the link...

In this article, I examine the current policy of full inclusion of children receiving special education services in regular education classrooms. Specifically, I focus on the policy's effects on the classmates of children with special needs, with a particular focus on classmates of students with...

Researchers typically examine peer effects by defining the peer group broadly (all classmates, schoolmates, neighbors) because of the lack of friendship information in many data sources as well as to enable the use of plausibly exogenous variation in peer group composition across cohorts in the...

Although economists have sought to link the health behaviours or outcomes of socially connected individuals for several decades, there has been a recent resurgence in interest and expansion in empirical techniques. Studies that attempt to estimate social network effects in health decisions face...