Prescription drug expenditures are the fastest growing component of health care spending, rising threefold over the 1995–2007 period. Coinciding with this growth has been a surge in direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA), made feasible by the Food and Drug Administrations's (FDA's)...

Prior studies, by relying on nationally representative surveys, have overlooked the important fact that use of addictive substances is not uniformly distributed; subgroups of hardcore users account for most of the drug consumption. This study employs the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring system to...

This study investigates the effects of alcohol advertising on adolescent alcohol consumption. The theory of an industry response function and evidence from prior studies indicate the importance of maximizing the variance in advertising measures. Monitoring the Future (MTF) and National...

We estimate the effect of illicit drug use during pregnancy on two measures of poor infant health: low birth weight and abnormal infant health conditions. We use data from a national longitudinal study of urban parents that includes postpartum interviews with mothers, hospital medical record...

Both economists and psychologists have studied the concept of risk preference. Economists categorize individuals as more or less risk-tolerant based on the marginal utility of income. Psychologists categorize individuals' propensity towards risk based on harm avoidance, novelty seeking and...