The purpose of this paper is to examine the direct relationship between the prices of alcohol and drugs and the incidence of criminal violence in a nationally representative sample of individuals in the United States. The positive association between substance use and violence is well...

Each year, approximately 10,000 individuals die in alcohol-impaired traffic crashes in the United States, while psychoactive drugs are involved in 20% of all fatal traffic crashes. In this study, we investigate whether state-specific parity laws for substance use disorder (SUD) treatment have...

21 states and the District of Columbia currently have laws that permit marijuana use for medical purposes, often termed medical marijuana laws (MMLs). We tested the effects of MMLs adopted in seven states between 2004 and 2011 on adolescent and adult marijuana, alcohol, and hard drug use. We...

Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky...

We exploit arguably exogenous train schedule changes in Washington DC to investigate the relationship between public transportation provision, the risky decision to consume alcohol, and the criminal decision to engage in alcohol-impaired driving. Using a triple differences strategy, we provide...

This paper estimates the impact of fraternity and sorority membership on a wide array of drinking outcomes among respondents to four Harvard College Alcohol Study surveys from 1993-2001. Identification is achieved by including proxies for specific types of unobserved heterogeneity expected to...

This paper examines the relationship between membership in social fraternities and sororities and binge drinking among 18-24 year old full-time four-year college students who participated in the 1995 National College Health Risk Behavior Survey. To deal with unobserved heterogeneity in binge...

This paper estimates the effects of friends' health behaviors, smoking and drinking, on own health behaviors for adolescents while controlling for the effects of correlated unobservables between those friends. Specifically, the effect of friends' health behaviors is identified by comparing...

The threat posed by smoking to health in India is severe. Already 1 in 5 of all adult male deaths and 1 in 20 of all adult female deaths at ages 30-69 are due to smoking and India will soon have 1 million smoking deaths a year. Increasing tobacco prices has been found to be the single most...