The Economics of Tobacco Regulation: A Comprehensive Review.

Tobacco regulation has been a major component of health policy in the developed world since the UK Royal College of Physicians' and the US Surgeon General's reports in the 1960s. Such regulation, which has intensified in the past two decades, includes cigarette taxation, place-based smoking bans in areas ranging from bars and restaurants to workplaces, and regulations designed to make tobacco products less desirable. More recently, the availability of alternative products, most notably e-cigarettes, has increased dramatically, and these products are just starting to be regulated. Despite an extensive body of research on tobacco regulations, there remains substantial debate regarding their effectiveness, and ultimately, their impact on economic welfare. We provide the first comprehensive review of the state of research in the economics of tobacco regulation in two decades.

Do Health Insurance Mandates Spillover to Education? Evidence from Michigan's Autism Insurance Mandate.

Social programs and mandates are usually studied in isolation, but unintended spillovers to other areas can impact individual behavior and social welfare. We examine the presence of spillovers from health care policy to the education sector by studying how health insurance coverage affects the education of students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). We leverage a state mandate that increased insurance coverage of ASD-related services, which often are provided by both the private sector and within public schools. The mandate primarily affected coverage for children with private health insurance, so we proxy for private insurance coverage with students' economic disadvantage status and estimate effects via triple-differences. While we find little change in ASD identification, the mandate crowds-out special education supports for students with ASD. A lack of short-run impact on achievement supports our crowd-out interpretation and indicates that the mandate had little net effect on the academic achievement of ASD students.

The effect of prices on nutrition: Comparing the impact of product- and nutrient-specific taxes.

This paper provides an analysis of the role of prices in determining food purchases and nutrition using very detailed transaction-level observations for a large, nationally-representative sample of US consumers over the period 2002-2007. Using product-specific nutritional information, we develop a new method of partitioning the product space into relevant nutritional clusters that define a set of nutritionally-bundled goods, which parsimoniously characterize consumer choice sets. We then estimate a large utility-derived demand system over this joint product-nutrient space that allows us to calculate price and expenditure elasticities. Using our structural demand estimates, we simulate the role of product taxes on soda, sugar-sweetened beverages, packaged meals, and snacks, and nutrient taxes on fat, salt, and sugar. We find that a 20% nutrient tax has a significantly larger impact on nutrition than an equivalent product tax, due to the fact that these are broader-based taxes. However, the costs of these taxes in terms of consumer utility are only about 70 cents per household per day. A sugar tax in particular is a powerful tool to induce healthier nutritive bundles among consumers.

Early Retirement Incentives and Student Achievement.

Early retirement incentives (ERIs) are increasingly prevalent in education as districts seek to close budget gaps by replacing expensive experienced teachers with lower-cost newer teachers. Combined with the aging of the teacher workforce, these ERIs are likely to change the composition of teachers dramatically in the coming years. We use exogenous variation from an ERI program in Illinois in the mid-1990s to provide the first evidence in the literature of the effects of large-scale teacher retirements on student achievement. We find the program did not reduce test scores; likely, it increased them, with positive effects most pronounced in lower-SES schools.

Within-family obesity associations: evaluation of parent, child, and sibling relationships.

BACKGROUND: How parent and sibling obesity status comparatively shape a child's obesity is unknown. PURPOSE: To investigate how the obesity status of different children within the same family is related to a parent or sibling's obesity. METHODS: A national sample of adults in 10,244 American households was surveyed during 2011; data were analyzed in 2012-2013. Of these households, 1,948 adults had one or two children; provided sociodemographic information; and reported on adult and child height and weight, physical activity, and food environment. Logistic regression models were estimated in which the outcome of interest was child obesity status, with parent and sibling obesity as key predictors, adjusting for a range of both adult and child social and demographic confounders. RESULTS: In one-child households, it was 2.2 times more likely (SE=0.5) that the child would be obese if a parent was obese. In households with two children, having an obese younger sibling was more strongly associated with elder-child obesity (OR=5.4, SE=1.9) than parent's obesity status (OR=2.3, SE=0.8). Having an obese elder sibling was associated with younger-child obesity (OR=5.6, SE=1.9), and parent obesity status was no longer significant. Within-family sibling obesity was more strongly patterned between siblings of the same gender than between different genders, and child physical activity was significantly associated with obesity status. CONCLUSIONS: Considering offspring composition and sibling gender may be beneficial in childhood obesity prevention and intervention.

Why Have College Completion Rates Declined? An Analysis of Changing Student Preparation and Collegiate Resources.

Rising college enrollment over the last quarter century has not been met with a proportional increase in college completion. Comparing the high school classes of 1972 and 1992, we show declines in college completion rates have been most pronounced for men who first enroll in less selective public universities and community colleges. We decompose the decline into the components due to changes in preparedness of entering students and due to changes in collegiate characteristics, including type of institution and resources per student. While both factors play some role, the supply-side characteristics are most important in explaining changes in college completion. (JEL I23).

The fatal toll of driving to drink: the effect of minimum legal drinking age evasion on traffic fatalities.

There is a sizeable literature on the effect of minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) restrictions on teenage drunk driving. This paper adds to the literature by examining the effect of MLDA evasion across states with different alcohol restrictions. Using state-of-the-art GIS software and micro-data on fatal vehicle accidents from 1977 to 2002, we find that in counties within 25 miles of a lower-MLDA jurisdiction, a legal restriction on drinking does not reduce youth involvement in fatal accidents and, for 18 and 19-year-old drivers, fatal accident involvement actually increases. Farther from such a border, we find results consistent with the previous literature that MLDA restrictions are effective in reducing accident fatalities. The estimates imply that, of the total reduction in teenager-involved fatalities due to the equalization of state MLDAs at 21 in the 1970s and 1980s, for 18-year olds between a quarter and a third and for 19-year olds over 15 percent was due to equalization. Furthermore, the effect of changes in the MLDA is quite heterogeneous with respect to the fraction of a state's population that need not travel far to cross a border to evade its MLDA. Our results imply the effect of lowering the MLDA in select states, such as has been proposed in Vermont, could lead to sizeable increases in teenage involvement in fatal accidents due to evasion of local alcohol restrictions.