This paper examines the extent to which college students who drink alcohol influence their peers. We exploit a natural experiment in which students at a large state university were randomly assigned roommates through a lottery system. We find that on average, males assigned to roommates who...

The past five years have seen a dramatic turn of events against the tobacco industry, raising the question of the appropriate future path for smoking policy in the U.S. This paper discusses the theory and evidence on regulation of smoking. I begin by reviewing the background on this industry. I...

We exploit differences in European mortality rates to estimate the effect of institutions on economic performance. Europeans adopted very different colonization policies in different colonies, with different associated institutions. In places where Europeans faced high mortality rates, they...

This paper evaluates an experiment in which individuals in rural Malawi were randomly assigned monetary incentives to learn their HIV results after being tested. Distance to the HIV results centers was also randomly assigned. Without any incentive, 34 percent of the participants learned their...

When capital and labor markets are imperfect, choice sets narrow, and parents must choose how to ration available funds and time between their children. One consequence is that children become rivals for household resources. In economies with pro-male bias, such rivalries can yield gains to...

Over the past decades, due to a combination of declining fertility rates and rising life expectancies, most industrialized countries have experienced aging populations and low numbers of young populations that may pose economic problems in the future. This paper investigates the relationship...

This study extends the literature on the demand for child height to consider the demand for child micronutrient status. Micronutrient malnutrition is a pervasive and debilitating problem in many developing countries. A central focus concerns the distinct roles of maternal schooling versus...

Objectives - The aim of this study is to evaluate the costs and consequences of the provision of the prison methadone program in NSW, compared with no prison methadone. Methods - This study has measured the costs involved in the provision of the prison methadone program in NSW. The overall cost...

The aim of this paper is to decompose cross-national differences in self-reported general health into parts explained by differences in "true" health, measured by diagnosed conditions and measurements, and parts explained by cross-cultural differences in response styles. The data used were drawn...