As of 1987, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act (ADAA) has imposed mandatory minimum sentences for drug traffickers based on the quantity of the drug involved regardless of its purity. Using the STRIDE dataset on drug arrests and a differences-in-differences approach, I find that this led to an increase in...

This paper analyzes the incidence of participation in various activities generally expected to have an impact on current and future physical health. Attention is focused on the incidence of these activities among immigrant and minority groups compared to native-born white Canadians. Immigrants...

The paper investigates whether self-assessed health status (SAH) contains information about future mortality and morbidity, beyond the information that is contained in standard "observable" characteristics of individuals (including pre-existing diagnosed medical conditions). Using a ten-year...

The paper investigates whether self-assessed health status (SAH) contains information about future mortality and morbidity, beyond the information that is contained in standard “observable” characteristics of individuals (including pre-existing diagnosed medical conditions). Using a ten-year...

This paper examines the relationship between measures of income poverty, undernourishment, childhood undernutrition, and child mortality in developing countries. While there is, as expected, a close aggregate correlation between these measures of deprivation, the measures generate some...

This paper anlyses how parental education affects child human capital outcomes, using household survey data from Mozambique. Four indicators of human capital are examined: height-for-age of children below 5 years of age, children''s rate of survival, children''s education, and total fertility of...

A considerable literature seems to argue the use of person trade-offs to estimate the quality-adjustment factor in Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALY) models. A similar practise is followed by the WHO to estimate the disability weights used in calculation of Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALY)...

In this paper we assess the causal impact of HIV/AIDS on monetary poverty using a panel data-set from South Africa and modeling the consequences of the illness on both earnings and transfers. Two major econometric problems are likely to bias the estimation: endogeneity of the HIV/AIDS dummy...

This paper uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Yoth to examine the effect of smoking on wages and employment. The panel nature and household structure of these data enable us to implement methods to account for differences in observed and unobserved individual characteristics that...

Usage of health facilities in Ethiopia is among the lowest in the world; raising usage rates is probably critical for improving health outcomes. The government has diagnosed the principal problem as the lack of primary health facilities and is devoting a large share of the health budget to...