We examine the first-order internal effects of unemployment on a range of health behaviors during the most recent recession using longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79). Consistent with prior studies based on...

One of the main purposes of recent healthcare reform (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act - ACA) in the U.S. is to enable Americans to make more productive use of their time. We examine how the ACA's dependent care coverage mandate (DCM) affected young adults' time allocation. Based on...

Since at least the early 1990s, economists have found substantial evidence of "job lock" in the United States: workers who get health insurance from their employer are less likely to switch jobs. Early work showed stronger job lock among groups that place a higher value on health insurance,...

Previous studies, by relying on nationally representative surveys, have overlooked the important fact that use of addictive substances is not uniformly distributed; subgroups of hardcore users account for most of the drug consumption. This study employs the Drug Use Forecasting system to analyze...

This paper estimates the empirical relationship between the prices of cocaine and heroin and objective indicators of use. The set of outcomes is drug related hospital emergency department admissions where cocaine and heroin are cited, for 21 large U.S. metropolitan areas. These outcomes are...