Enforcement efforts are the primary approach to reduce illegal drug use in the U.S., but evidence on their effectiveness is mixed. We provide new evidence on the effectiveness of enforcement efforts by using rich administrative records and the staggered implementation of state laws targeting...

In mid-1995, a government effort to reduce the supply of methamphetamine precursors successfully disrupted the methamphetamine market and interrupted a trajectory of increasing usage. The price of methamphetamine tripled and purity declined from 90 percent to 20 percent. Simultaneously,...

Age based school entry laws force parents and educators to consider an important tradeoff. Though students who enter school early typically have poorer academic performance, on average, they stay in school longer. The popular and academic press has focused primarily on the former effect which...

A substantial economics literature documents that tighter alcohol controls reduce alcohol related harms, but far less is known about mechanisms. We use the universe of Canadian mortality records to document that Canada's Minimum Legal Drinking Age (MLDA) significantly reduces mortality rates of...

Substantial uncertainty exists regarding the causal effect of health insurance on the utilization of care. Most studies cannot determine whether the large differences in healthcare utilization between the insured and the uninsured are due to insurance status or to other unobserved differences...

We provide a critical review of research in economics that has examined causal relationships between alcohol use and crime. We lay out several causal pathways through which alcohol regulation and alcohol consumption may affect crime, including: direct pharmacological effects on aggression,...