<DIV>Conventional wisdom once held that the demand for addictive substances like cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs was unlike that for any other economic good and, therefore, unresponsive to traditional market forces. Recently, however, researchers from two disparate fields, economics and behavioral...</div>

The behavioral economic model presented in this paper argues that the effect of advertising and price differ by past consumption levels. The model predicts that advertising is more effective in reducing consumption at high past consumption levels but less effective at low past consumption...

Prescription drug expenditures are the fastest growing component of health care spending, rising threefold over the 1995–2007 period. Coinciding with this growth has been a surge in direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA), made feasible by the Food and Drug Administrations's (FDA's)...

The purposes of this paper are to measure self-regulation, to investigate whether self-regulation differs across different health related choices, to estimate its effect on health choices and to estimate the effect of self-regulation on health-demographic gradients. The theory and empirical...

While the prevalence of smokeless tobacco (ST) is low relative to smoking, the distribution of ST use is highly skewed with consumption concentrated among certain segments of the population (rural residents, males, whites, low-educated individuals). Furthermore, there is suggestive evidence that...

This study examines racial, ethnic and gender &lpar;REG&rpar; differentials in physical activity &lpar;PA&rpar;, a significant input into human capital investments. We construct detailed and all-inclusive PA measures from the American Time Use Surveys, which capture both the duration and the intensity of each...

This paper empirically tests the effect of clean indoor air laws on smoking. Public place clean indoor air laws restrict cigarette smoking in public places such as restaurants. Private place clean air laws regulate smoking in private work places as well as in public places. This study uses a...

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the effect that mental illness has on the demand for addictive goods. Mental illness could affect the level of consumption of addictive goods and could affect the price elasticities of addictive goods. Demand theory suggests that mental illness would...