Background: Digital technologies have significantly changed the way adolescents perceive the world around them. The perception of the social environment is crucial for their well-being and health. Objectives: This paper aims to evaluate the relationship between the perceived life circumstances...

In contrast to West Germany, illicit drugs were virtually absent in East Germany until 1990. However, after the collapse of the former GDR, East Germany was expected to encounter a sharp increase in substance abuse. By analyzing individual data, we find that East Germany largely caught up with...

Social interactions are widely recognized to play an important role in smoking initiation among adolescents. In this paper, we hypothesize that emotionally stable, conscientious individuals are better able to resist peer pressure in the uptake of smoking. We exploit detailed friendship...

Addiction has attracted considerable attention in health and behavioral economics, and economists have attempted to understand addiction from the viewpoint of decision making over time. This paper investigates whether two time preference parameters can successfully predict smoking status,...

Using within-family variation from twins and siblings, I find that smokers earn approximately 16% less than nonsmokers. Possible explanations for this earning difference are addiction-related productivity declines and earning reductions from higher health insurance costs. To investigate further,...

Little is currently known about the effects of shocks to parental health on the allocation of children’s time between alternative activities. Using longitudinal data from the Ethiopian Young Lives surveys of 2006 and 2009, we analyse the effect of health shocks on the amount of children’s...

Migrationmay affect fertility and child health care of those remaining in the country of origin.Mexican data show that having at least one household member who migrated to the United States decreases the occurrence of pregnancy among teenagers by 0.339 probability points. This finding can be...

The alert lifestyle, the great availability and accessibility of foodstuff and the powerful pressure exercised by the food industry by means of mass-media, in order to encourage overconsumption, have disturbed all the elements of food consumers’ behaviour, causing them to miss the nutritional...