On April 7, 2020, Wisconsin held its presidential primary election, and news reports showed long lines of voters due to fewer polling locations. We use county-level variation in voting patterns and weekly county-level COVID test data to examine whether in-person voting increased COVID-19 cases....

We estimate effects of e-cigarette taxes enacted in eight states and two large counties on e-cigarette prices, e-cigarette sales, and sales of other tobacco products. We use Nielsen Retail Scanner data from 2011 to 2017, comprising approximately 35,000 retailers nationally. We develop a method...

We examine the extent to which self-reported health measures suffer from reporting bias and then characterize how this reporting bias affects the estimation of income-related health inequality as measured by the concentration index. We run a comprehensive set of tests of reporting bias using...

A motivation for increasing health insurance coverage is to improve health outcomes for impacted populations. However, health insurance coverage may alternatively increase risky health behaviors due to ex ante moral hazard, and past research on this issue has led to mixed conclusions. This paper...

This paper uses unconditional quantile regression to estimate whether smokers' responses to tobacco control policies change across the distribution of smoking levels. I measure smoking behavior with the number of cigarettes smoked per day and also with serum cotinine levels, a continuous...

Violence is one of the leading social problems in the United States. The development of appropriate public policies to curtail violence is confounded by the relationship between alcohol and violence. In this paper, we estimate the propensity of alcohol control policies to reduce the perpetration...

We use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health to investigate the association between having acne in middle to high school and subsequent educational and labor market outcomes. We find that having acne is strongly positively associated with overall grade point...

This paper estimates effects of e-cigarette taxes enacted in eight states and two large counties on e-cigarette prices, e-cigarette sales, and sales of other tobacco products. We use NielsenIQ Retail Scanner data from 2011 to 2017, comprising approximately 35,000 retailers nationally, and...

We investigate the hot hand hypothesis using detailed data on free throws and field goal attempts for the 2004-2005 through 2015-2016 NBA regular seasons. Free throws represent a more controlled setting, allowing a closer examination of the potential physiological mechanisms behind success in...

The seasonal influenza virus afflicts millions of people in the U.S. population each year, imposing significant costs on those who fall ill, their families, employers, and the health care system. The flu is transmitted via droplet spread or close contact, and certain environments, such as...