In this study, I examine the effect of drug use on poverty. The main objective of the paper is to provide descriptive empirical information about the relationship between drug use and poverty, and to explore, in a preliminary fashion, the question of whether drug use causes poverty. Toward this...

State laws regulating abortion have increased markedly in the wake of recent Supreme Court decisions. We test whether one form of abortion regulation, parental involvement laws, affects how pregnancies are resolved. Specifically, we examine whether laws that require minors to notify or obtain...

In this paper we extensively analyze the impact of child health and other family characteristics on the cognitive achievement of children between the ages of five and nine. We estimate both cross sectional and fixed effects models using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth....

This paper analyzes the effect of Medicaid eligibility expansions on the health insurance coverage of women giving birth and on the use of prenatal care and infant health, controlling for year and state effects and state-specific trends that may be correlated with expansions in Medicaid...

Neoclassical labor market theories imply that employers will react to binding minimum wages by changing the level of employment. A multitude of studies consider this aspect of minimum wages, yet fail to reach a consensus as to its employment effects. While the employment effects of the minimum...

This paper develops a method to correct for non-random measurement error in a binary indicator of illicit drugs. Our results suggest that estimates of the effect of self reported prenatal drug use on birth weight are biased upwards by measurement error -- a finding contrary to predictions of a...

Basic economic theory suggests that health insurance coverage may cause a reduction in prevention activities, but empirical studies have yet to provide much evidence to support this prediction. However, in other insurance contexts that involve adverse health events, evidence of ex ante moral...

In this paper, we re-examine the question of crowd out among children. Our primary contribution is the use of longitudinal data. These data allow us to identify several groups of children depending on whether their eligibility for Medicaid was affected by the eligibility expansions, and to...

We use data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth 1979 and 1997 cohorts to compare welfare use, fertility rates, educational attainment, and marriage rates among teenage women in the years before and the years immediately following welfare reform. Our first objective is to document...

Drug use and welfare are two serious social problems that have received widespread public attention. Recently, it has been suggested that illicit drug use is a major cause of welfare, although there is only anecdotal evidence to support such a claim. This paper provides the first systematic...