Medical marijuana laws and mental health in the United States.

The consequences of legal access to medical marijuana for individuals' well-being are controversially assessed. We contribute to the discussion by evaluating the impact of the introduction of medical marijuana laws across US states on self-reported mental health considering different motives for cannabis consumption. Our analysis is based on BRFSS survey data from close to eight million respondents between 1993 and 2018 that we combine with information from the NSDUH to estimate individual consumption propensities. We find that eased access to marijuana through medical marijuana laws reduce the reported number of days with poor mental health for individuals with a high propensity to consume marijuana for medical purposes and for those individuals who likely suffer from frequent pain.

Does the Dream of Home Ownership Rest Upon Biased Beliefs? A Test Based on Predicted and Realized Life Satisfaction.

The belief that home ownership makes people happy is probably one of the most widespread intuitive theories of happiness. However, whether it is accurate is an open question. Based on individual panel data, we explore whether home buyers systematically overestimate the life satisfaction associated with moving to their privately owned property. To identify potential prediction errors, we compare people's forecasts of their life satisfaction in 5 years' time with their current realizations. We find that home buyers for whom the purchase of the home is a main reason for moving, on average, systematically overestimate the long-term satisfaction gain of living in their dwelling. The misprediction therein is driven by home buyers who follow extrinsically-oriented life goals, highlighting biased beliefs regarding own preferences as a relevant mechanism in the prediction errors.

Swiss Municipal Data Merger Tool: Open-source Software for the Compilation of Longitudinal Municipal-level Data.

The Swiss Municipal Data Merger Tool (Swiss MDMT) offers a solution to a frequent data management problem encountered when compiling longitudinal datasets involving Swiss municipalities as the observational units. Due to municipal mergers, the number of municipalities in Switzerland declined from 3,095 in 1960 to 2,202 in 2020. As a consequence, manually securing the correct spatial reference when merging historical cross-sectional data is tedious and time-consuming. To facilitate this operation, the Swiss MDMT considers mutations at the municipal level and maps municipalities of a first point in time to municipalities in a second point in time based on information provided by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office's municipality inventory. The tool is distributed as an open-source R package and is freely available on CRAN.

Le Swiss Municipal Data Merger Tool (Swiss MDMT) présente une solution à un problème de gestion des données rencontré lors de la compilation de données longitudinales impliquant des communes suisses comme unités d'observation. Le nombre de communes en Suisse est passé de 3 095 en 1960 à 2 202 en 2020 due à des fusions de communes. Par conséquent, il est fastidieux d'assurer manuellement la référence spatiale correcte lors de la fusion de données historiques. Pour faciliter cette opération, le Swiss MDMT prend en compte les mutations au niveau municipal et associe les municipalités d'un premier instant aux municipalités d'un deuxième instant sur la base des informations fournies par la liste historisée des communes de l'Office fédéral de la statistique. Le Swiss MDMT est un package R et il est disponible gratuitement sur CRAN.

Limited Self-control, Obesity, and the Loss of Happiness.

Is obesity the consequence of an optimally chosen lifestyle or do people consume too much relative to their long-term preferences? The latter perspective accepts that people might face self-control problems when exposed to the immediate gratification from food. We exploit unique survey data for Switzerland in multinomial logit and ordered probit regressions to study (i) the covariates of obesity including indicators of self-control and (ii) the consequences of obesity on the subjective well-being of people with limited willpower. Our main finding is that obesity decreases the well-being of individuals who report having limited self-control, but not otherwise. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Smoking bans, cigarette prices and life satisfaction.

The consequences of tobacco control policies for individual welfare are difficult to assess, even more so when related consumption choices challenge people's willpower. We therefore evaluate the impact of smoking bans and cigarette prices on subjective well-being by analyzing data for 40 European countries and regions between 1990 and 2011. We exploit the staggered introduction of bans and apply an imputation strategy to study the effect of anti-smoking policies on people with different propensities to smoke. We find that higher cigarette prices reduce the life satisfaction of likely smokers. Overall, smoking bans are barely related to subjective well-being, but increase the life satisfaction of smokers who would like to quit smoking. The latter finding is consistent with cue-triggered models of addiction and the idea of bans as self-control devices.

pvsR: An Open Source Interface to Big Data on the American Political Sphere.

Digital data from the political sphere is abundant, omnipresent, and more and more directly accessible through the Internet. Project Vote Smart (PVS) is a prominent example of this big public data and covers various aspects of U.S. politics in astonishing detail. Despite the vast potential of PVS' data for political science, economics, and sociology, it is hardly used in empirical research. The systematic compilation of semi-structured data can be complicated and time consuming as the data format is not designed for conventional scientific research. This paper presents a new tool that makes the data easily accessible to a broad scientific community. We provide the software called pvsR as an add-on to the R programming environment for statistical computing. This open source interface (OSI) serves as a direct link between a statistical analysis and the large PVS database. The free and open code is expected to substantially reduce the cost of research with PVS' new big public data in a vast variety of possible applications. We discuss its advantages vis-à-vis traditional methods of data generation as well as already existing interfaces. The validity of the library is documented based on an illustration involving female representation in local politics. In addition, pvsR facilitates the replication of research with PVS data at low costs, including the pre-processing of data. Similar OSIs are recommended for other big public databases.

Prosocial Motivation and Blood Donations: A Survey of the Empirical Literature.

Recent shortages in the supply of blood donations have renewed the interest in how blood donations can be increased temporarily. We survey the evidence on the role of financial and other incentives in eliciting blood donations among donors who are normally willing to donate pro bono. We present the predictions from different empirical/psychological-based theories, with some predicting that incentives are effective while others predict that incentives may undermine prosocial motivation. The evidence suggests that incentives work relatively well in settings in which donors are relatively anonymous, but evidence indicates also that when image concerns become important, incentives may be counterproductive as donors do not want to be seen as greedy.

Free cholesterol testing as a motivation device in blood donations: evidence from field experiments.

BACKGROUND: Health tests are often seen as promising donor incentives to improve the supply of blood. However, systematic behavioral evidence on donor recruitment is scarce. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS: To study the effectiveness of a free cholesterol test in attracting new donors and motivating previous donors, two field experiments were conducted. In Study 1, 2825 nondonors were randomly assigned to one of three treatments: a solicitation letter, a solicitation letter plus an appeal, or a solicitation letter plus an appeal and the offer of a free cholesterol test. In Study 2, 8269 previous donors were randomly assigned to one of three treatments: a standard invitation, an invitation plus an appeal, or an invitation plus an appeal and a cholesterol test. Marginal effects from probit estimations were calculated to study the effects of the treatments on donors' response. RESULTS: In Study 1, only 0.6 percent reacted to the solicitation letter. There were no significant differences in the response rates between the three treatments. In Study 2, 45.3 percent of the invited previous donors came to donate. The appeal (marginal effect, -0.5%; standard error [SE], 1.9%) and offering a cholesterol test (marginal effect, 1.6%; SE, 1.8%) did not significantly increase the probability of a donation relative to the standard invitation. The treatment effects for the cholesterol test did not systematically differ between frequent and infrequent donors and female and male donors. There is some evidence that young donors responded relatively most positive to the cholesterol test (marginal effect, 4.4%; SE, 2.2%). CONCLUSIONS: Contrary to conclusions from survey studies, free cholesterol testing did not significantly increase donations from nondonors and previous donors during a 3-month campaign. The two studies show that field experiments are an important method to evaluate donation incentives, because measuring donors' intentions alone can lead to significantly different conclusions.