We study the impact of the 1918 influenza pandemic on short- and medium-term economic performance in Sweden. The pandemic was one of the severest and deadliest pandemics in human history, but it has hitherto received only scant attention in the economic literature – despite representing an...

A key question in the ongoing policy debate over cannabis’ legal status is whether liberalizing cannabis laws leads to an increase in cannabis use. This paper provides new evidence on the impact of a specific type of liberalization, decriminalization, on initiation into cannabis use. Our...

Can private sector participation (PSP) in the piped water sector improve child health? I use child-level data from 39 African countries during 1986–2010 to show that PSP decreases diarrhea among urban-dwelling, under-five children by 2.6 percentage points, or 16% of its mean prevalence....

Health-related external benefits are of potentially large importance for public policy. This paper investigates health-related external benefits using a stated-preference discrete-choice experiment framed in a health care context and including choice scenarios defined by six attributes related...

The first major insurance expansion of the Affordable Care Act – a provision requiring insurers to allow dependents to remain on parents’ health insurance until turning 26 – took effect in September 2010. We estimate this mandate's impacts on numerous outcomes related to health care...

I exploit the age-based eligibility structure of Medicare and the age gap between spouses to examine the impact of Medicare eligibility of an older spouse on the insurance coverage of younger, Medicare-ineligible spouses. Using a regression discontinuity framework, I find that Medicare...

This paper investigates the short-term effects of public smoking bans on individual smoking behavior. In 2007 and 2008, state-level smoking bans were gradually introduced in all of Germany's federal states. We exploit this variation to identify the effect that smoke-free policies had on...