Using recently released data on public mental health expenditures by U.S. states from 1997 to 2005, this study is the first to examine the effect of state mental health spending on suicide rates. We find the effect of per capita public mental health expenditures on the suicide rate to be...

The principal-agent problem and uncertainty are some of the key factors affecting financial and political markets. Fear of the unknown plays an important role in human decision making, including voting. This article describes a theoretical model where voter risk aversion towards uncertainty...

Many important determinants of traffic fatalities have been identified using the widely popular fixed-effects (FE) estimator for panel data. However, the FE estimator precludes an analysis of time-invariant or rarely changing variables, thereby obscuring their relative impact on traffic...

Despite the trend toward fewer armed conflicts and war deaths, dramatic variations in conflict casualties exist across countries. This article examines what factors affect casualties in civil as well as interstate wars and finds that conflict casualties are directly influenced by geography and...