Public-place smoking restrictions are the most important non-price tobacco control measures worldwide, yet surprisingly little is known about their effects on exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS). We study these laws in Canada using data with questions about respondents' ETS exposure in...

Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky...

Using county-level data on COVID-19 mortality and infections, along with county-level information on the adoption of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) in the United States, we examine how the speed of NPI adoption affected COVID-19 mortality. Our estimates suggest that advancing the date...

As evidence of the negative effects of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) has mounted, an increasingly popular public policy response has been to impose restrictions on smoking through 100% smoke-free bans (comprehensive smoking bans). Yet sparse information exists regarding the impact these...

Many states have recently changed their scope of practice laws and granted full practice authority to nurse practitioners, allowing them to practice without oversight from physicians. Physician groups have argued against this change, citing patient safety concerns. In this paper, we use a...

The national hepatitis C elimination initiative provides an opportunity to dramatically expand access to hepatitis C virus (HCV) treatment and put the US on a path to eliminating hepatitis C. Our objective was to project the health benefits and cost savings of this initiative. A previously...

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the United States healthcare system, resulting in major disruptions in the delivery of essential care and causing crippling financial losses that threaten the viability of millions of medical practices. There is little empirical evidence on the types...

A rich economic literature has examined the human capital impacts of disease-eliminating health interventions, such as the rollout of new vaccines. This literature is based on reduced-form approaches which exploit proxies for disease burden, such as mortality, instead of actual infection counts,...

Although yet to be clearly identified as a clinical condition, there is immense concern at the health and wellbeing consequences of long COVID. Using data collected from nearly half a million Americans in the period June 2022-December 2022 in the US Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey (HPS),...

Poverty is strongly associated with worse health across countries and within countries across individuals. However, not all poor individuals suffer from poor health: the effects of poverty on health vary across place and time. In this review, we discuss the evidence documenting these patterns,...