This paper presents a method of estimating the deadweight loss of a tax system for economies in which the bulk of revenue comes from labor and commodity taxes. It shares many of the desirable characteristics of general equilibrium models (and correspondingly avoids many of the pitfalls...

Smokers not only choose the number of cigarettes to smoke in any given period on the basis of price, they also choose the intensity with which to smoke - that is, how much nicotine to inhale. The possibility that quantity-reducing tax policies may be mitigated, or even completely offset, by...

It is well known that an uncertain income stream will induce individuals to save if they are forward-looking. In this paper we investigate the consequences of such saving on the distribution of wealth among households. The inquiry is motivated by the fact that both the dispersion of the US...

New health warnings on tobacco packaging in Canada became mandatory in January 2001. As of that time producers were required to print large-font warning text and graphic images describing the health consequences of using tobacco. This study uses micro data from two waves of Health Canada's...

Bans on retail tobacco displays, of the type proposed by New York's Mayor Bloomberg in March 2013, have been operative in several economies since 2001. Despite an enormous number of studies in public health journals using attitudinal data, we can find no population-based econometric studies of...

type="main" xml:lang="en" <p>Numerous employers in over 20 U.S. states currently discriminate legally against smokers in their hiring policies. We analyze the cost of being a smoker, measured in annual hospital days, and compare this with the cost of being a former smoker, the cost of being obese,...</p>

This paper models earnings of male and female Bachelor's graduates in Canada five years after graduation. Using a university fixed-effect approach, the research finds evidence of significant (fixed) variations in earnings among graduates from different universities. Within universities changes...