We exploit a quasi-experiment created when New York State began in 2011 to tax cigarettes sold on Native American Reservations. The regime change represents a unique opportunity to quantify brand loyalty because it almost doubled the price of premium-brand cigarettes, while Native brands were...

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...

We use data from the Population Assessment of Tobacco Use and Health (PATH), a longitudinal data set including self-reported and biomarker measures of tobacco use, to examine the effects of state-level tobacco 21 (T21) laws on smoking and vaping. T21 laws reduce self-reported cigarette smoking...

What happens when the findings of a prominent medical study are overturned? Using a medical trial on breech births, we estimate the effect of the reversal of such a medical study on physician choices and infant health outcomes. Using the United States Birth Certificate Records from 1995-2010, we...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...