Excess drinking is associated with lost productivity, accidents, disability, early death, crime, neglect of family responsibilities, and personality deterioration. These and related concerns have justified special restrictions on alcoholic-beverage commerce and consumption. The nature and extent...

In 1978 North Carolina created a special fund to pay for abortions for indigent women. The appropriations for that fund have proven inadequate during five of the years in which it has been in operation, with the result in each case that no state funding was available for several months. This...

Observed patterns of youthful drinking indicate substantial persistence. This paper analyzes how much of that persistence reflects the actual development of a habit, and how much is due to unobserved aspects of the individual and the environment. The role of restrictions on alcohol availability,...

Urban crime rates in the United States fell markedly during the 1990s and remain at historically low levels. The statistical evidence presented here indicates that that decline, like the crime surge that preceded it, has been largely uncorrelated with changes in socioeconomic conditions across...

This study analyzes the effects of tobacco excise tax changes on mortality due to heart disease, cancer, and asthma. Reduced form regressions of mortality rates on tax data for the years 1954-1988, with controls for state, year, income, and unobserved persistence, indicate that tax increases...

A common practice in the fields of education, mental health, and juvenile justice is to segregate problem youths in groups with deviant peers. Assignments of this sort, which concentrate deviant youths, may facilitate deviant peer influence and lead to perverse outcomes. This possibility adds to...

Regression results from a 30-year panel of the state-level data indicate that changes in alcohol-excise taxes cause a reduction in drinking and lower all-cause mortality in the short run. But those results do not fully capture the long-term mortality effects of a permanent change in drinking...

There is growing concern that improving the academic skills of disadvantaged youth is too difficult and costly, so policymakers should instead focus either on vocationally oriented instruction for teens or else on early childhood education. Yet this conclusion may be premature given that so few...

Based on administrative data for five cohorts of public school children in North Carolina, we demonstrate that those born just after the cut date for starting school are likely to outperform those born just before in reading and math in middle school, and are less likely to be involved in...

On January 1, 1991, the federal excise tax on beer doubled, and the tax rates on wine and liquor increased as well. These changes are larger than the typical state-level changes that have been used to study the effect of price on alcohol abuse and its consequences. In this paper, we develop a...