We employ a unique 10-year panel dataset from California to examine both the effect crime has on homelessness as well as the effect homelessness has on crime. Our main estimator accounts for endogeneity by incorporating dynamics, controlling for time invariant unobserved heterogeneity, and...

The role of friends in the US opioid epidemic is examined. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (Add Health), adults aged 25-34 and their high school best friends are focused on. An instrumental variable technique is employed to estimate peer effects in opioid...

This paper estimates the long-run transmission of the Great Leap Famine (1959-61) to the current trade of Chinese provinces. Based on the provincial dispersion of famine severity, we find that provinces more severely affected by the famine have smaller food exports compared to non-food exports,...

Most research questions in agricultural and applied economics are of a causal nature, i.e., how one or more variables (e.g., policies, prices, the weather) affect one or more other variables (e.g., the welfare of individuals or the society, the demanded or produced quantity, pollution). Only a...

We revisit the effect of gun laws on suicide rates in the US states in the past 30 years by departing from the correlational analysis inherent in the previous literature and, instead, leveraging an instrumental variable (IV) approach based on policy convergences between contiguous states. The...

This paper uses the random assignment of poor families to treatment and control conditions in the Comprehensive Child Development Program (CCDP) to isolate the causal effect of center-based child care enrollment on child well-being. Operating throughout the early-1990's, the CCDP demonstration...