This paper estimates returns to education using a dynamic model of educational choice that synthesizes approaches in the structural dynamic discrete choice literature with approaches used in the reduced form treatment effect literature. It is an empirically robust middle ground between the two...

We present a dynamic life-cycle model of women's labor supply, marriage, and fertility choices that explicitly incorporates mental and physical health. Correlated mental and physical health production functions are simultaneously estimated, including the endogenous decisions to seek...

The reciprocal relationship between psychiatric and substance use disorders is well-known, yet it remains largely unknown whether mental health morbidity causally leads to addictive behaviours. This paper utilises a fixed effects instrumental variables model, which is identified by time-varying...

Newborn health is an important component in the chain of intergenerational transmission of disadvantage. This paper contributes to the literature on the determinants of health at birth in two ways. First, we analyze the role of maternal endowments and investments (education and smoking in...

As with most analyses involving microdata, applications of count data models must somehow account for unobserved heterogeneity. The count model literature has generally assumed that unobservables and observed covariates are statistically independent. Yet for many applications this independence...

We provide new cross-country evidence on smoking persistence in Europe, which can be due to both true state dependence and individual unobserved heterogeneity. We distinguish between the two by using semi-parametric panel data selection methods, applied to both the smoking participation and the...

When a binary variable is misclassified, the measurement error is necessarily correlated with the truth. This observation has implications for an instrumental variables (IV) framework in which the endogenous variable is a potentially mismeasured binary variable. Ignoring misclassification leads...

Background: This study investigates possible mechanisms that can explain the association between unemployment and smoking, that is a) unemployment increases smoking probability (causation), b) smoking increases the probability to become unemployed (selection), and c) differences in both smoking...

We show that individuals who are in poorer health, independently from smoking, are more likely to start smoking and to smoke more cigarettes than those with better non-smoking health. We present evidence of selection, relying on extensive data on morbidity and mortality. We show that health...

While smoking remains the leading preventable cause of death in Australia, existing policy options, except for bans on smoking at public places, seem to have limited scope for expansion. Eight new smoking bans, introduced in six different Australian jurisdictions over 2003 and 2005, provide a...