In this paper, I test whether a variety of social and economic factors are significantly related to an individuals family structure. I focus on the relationship between one particular type of family structure, a never married parent, and three variables: drug use, the generosity of welfare...

By exploiting a unique health insurance benefit design, we provide novel evidence on the causal association between outpatient and inpatient care. Our results indicate that greater outpatient spending was associated with more hospital admissions: a $100 increase in outpatient spending was...

Although many studies have tested neoclassical labor market theory's prediction that employers will react to binding minimum wages by reducing employment levels, much less empirical research has explored the possibility that employers also respond to minimum wages by adjusting non-wage...

This study, based mainly on the 1989–98 March Current Population surveys, finds that state-mandated health insurance benefits and small-group health insurance reform had no statistically significant effects on labor market outcomes such as the quantity of work, wages, and whether an...

Welfare reform has resulted in a dramatic decline in welfare caseloads and some have claimed that a significant number of low-income women may be without health insurance as a result. The loss of insurance may reduce low-income, pregnant women's health care utilization, and this may adversely...

In this paper, we used a randomized experiment, the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration (MTO) study, to assess whether several environmental attributes are causes of obesity. To accomplish our objective, we linked the MTO data with several external data sources that provide...

There is a general consensus among policymakers that raising tobacco taxes reduces cigarette consumption. However, evidence that tobacco taxes reduce adult smoking is relatively sparse. In this paper, we extend the literature in two ways: using data from the Current Population Survey Tobacco Use...

In this paper, I examine the relationship between sibling sex composition and educational achievement. First, I replicate the study of Butcher and Case (1994) using data on a more recent birth cohort. Contrary to the findings of that study, I find basically no effect of sibling sex composition...