Although a huge literature spanning several disciplines documents an association between poverty and child abuse, researchers have not found persuasive evidence that economic downturns increase abuse, despite their impacts on family income. In this paper, we address this seeming contradiction....

While at least a dozen state legislatures are considering bills to allow the consumption of marijuana for medicinal purposes, the federal government has recently intensified its efforts to close medical marijuana dispensaries. Federal officials contend that the legalization of medical marijuana...

Using data from the state and national Youth Risk Behavior Surveys for the period 1991-2005, Carpenter and Cook (2008) found a strong, negative relationship between cigarette taxes and youth smoking. We revisit this relationship using four additional waves of YRBS data (2007, 2009, 2011, and...

Previous researchers have argued that the social market for cigarettes insulates its participants from policies designed to curb youth smoking. Using state Youth Risk Behavior Survey data, we examine whether recent changes in state cigarette taxes affected how young smokers obtained their...

Previous researchers have argued that the social market for cigarettes insulates its participants from policies designed to curb youth smoking. Using state Youth Risk Behavior Survey data, we examine whether recent changes in state cigarette taxes affected how young smokers obtained their...

Although a huge literature spanning several disciplines documents an association between poverty and child abuse, researchers have not found persuasive evidence that economic downturns increase abuse, despite their impacts on family income. In this paper, we address this seeming contradiction....

While at least a dozen state legislatures are considering bills to allow the consumption of marijuana for medicinal purposes, the federal government has recently intensified its efforts to close medical marijuana dispensaries. Federal officials contend that the legalization of medical marijuana...

Grade-based performance measures are often relied on when considering the efficacy of education-related policy interventions. Yet, it is common for measures of student performance to be subjected to curves and discretized through letter-grade transformations. We show how transformed grades...

While comparing students across large differences in GPA follows one's intuition that higher GPAs correlate positively with higher-performing students, this need not be the case locally. Grade-point averaging is fundamentally a combinatorics problem, and thereby challenges inference based on...

We empirically model performance in the final round of a multiple-round tournament as a spatially autoregressive process, allowing us to sign and quantify the endogenous interactions between competitors. Doing so speaks to significant regularities in the data that suggest that a player's own...