Recent tobacco regulations proposed by the Food and Drug Administration have raised a thorny question: how should the cost-benefit analysis accompanying such policies value foregone consumer surplus associated with regulation-induced reductions in smoking? In a model with rational and fully...

This paper shows how to calculate consistent marginal effects on the original scale of the outcome variable in Stata after estimating a linear regression with a dependent variable that has been transformed by the inverse hyperbolic sine function. The method uses a nonparametric retransformation...

Although independent unobserved heterogeneity--variables that affect the dependent variable but are independent from the other explanatory variables of interest--do not affect the point estimates or marginal effects in least squares regression, they do affect point estimates in nonlinear models...

Report cards on provider performance are intended to improve consumer decision-making and address information gaps in the market for quality. However, inadequate risk adjustment of report-card measures often biases comparisons across providers. We test whether going to a skilled nursing facility...

The educational attainment of siblings is highly correlated. We test for a specific type of peer effect between siblings in educational attainment: genetic nurture. Specifically, we test whether a person's educational attainment is correlated with their sibling's polygenic score (PGS) for...

One of the most important changes to the United States health care system over the last two decades is the emergence of pay-for-performance as a way to encourage hospitals and other providers to improve quality of care. Unlike fee-for-service, these value-based purchasing programs measure...

The ongoing debate about the economic causes of obesity has focused on the changing relative prices of diet and exercise. This paper uses a model that explicitly includes time and spatially varying community-level urbanicity and price measures as instruments to obtain statistically correct...

Previous estimates on the association between body weight and wages in the literature have been contingent on education and occupation. This paper examines the direct effect of BMI on wages and the indirect effects operating through education and occupation choice, particularly for late-teen BMI...

There is much debate about whether the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill -- the greatest expansion of Medicare benefits since its creation in 1965 -- will improve the health of elderly Americans, and how much it will cost. We model how insurance affects medical care utilization, and subsequently,...