We investigate short and long-term effects of early childhood education using variation created by a unique policy experiment in British Columbia, Canada. Our findings imply starting Kindergarten one year late substantially reduces the probability of repeating the third grade, and meaningfully...

Fertility rates have long been falling in many developed countries while educational attainment in these countries has risen. We attempt to reconcile these two trends with a novel application of a recent model to generate plausibly causal effects of education on these decreases in fertility....

The special legal status of Indian tribes in the U.S. means that state excise taxes are not necessarily collected on cigarette purchases on Indian reservations. We focus on two under-studied but basic empirical economic questions this raises. Using novel data from New York surveys that asked...

The U.S. 2009 Tobacco Control Act opened the door for new anti-smoking policies by giving the Food and Drug Administration broad regulatory authority over the tobacco industry. We develop a behavioral welfare economics approach to conduct cost-benefit analysis of FDA tobacco regulations. We use...

We conduct an empirical study of the impact of consumer price-search on the shifting of cigarette excise taxes to consumer prices. We use novel data on the prices smokers report actually paying for cigarettes. We document substantial price dispersion. We find that cigarette taxes are shifted at...

In this paper we contribute new empirical results about consumers' decisions to avoid cigarette excise taxes, and a new applied welfare economic analysis of optimal excise taxation with tax avoidance. We examine direct measures of consumer excise tax avoidance in novel individual-level data from...

Explicit financial incentives, especially pay-for-performance (P4P) incentives, have been extensively employed in recent years by health plans and governments in an attempt to improve the quality of health care services. This study exploits a natural experiment in the province of Ontario, Canada...

Econometric estimates of the responsiveness of health-related consumer demand to higher prices are often key ingredients for policy analysis. Drawing on several examples, especially that of cigarette demand, we review the potential advantages and challenges of synthesizing econometric evidence...

While less-educated women are more likely to give birth as teenagers, there is scant evidence the relationship is causal. We investigate this possibility using variation in compulsory schooling laws (CSLs) to identify the impact of formal education on teen fertility for a large sample of women...

Tobacco regulation has been a major component of health policy in the developed world since the UK's Royal College of Physicians' and the U.S. Surgeon General's reports in the 1960s. Such regulation, which has intensified in the past two decades, includes cigarette taxation, place-based smoking...