Suchergebnisse

"The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email. Over 20 states have adopted laws requiring youths to wear a helmet when riding a bicycle. We confirm previous research indicating that these laws reduced fatalities and increased helmet use, but we also show that the laws significantly reduced youth bicycling. We find this result in standard two-way fixed effects models of parental reports of youth bicycling, as well as in triple difference models of self-reported bicycling among high school youths that explicitly account for bicycling by youths just above the helmet law age threshold. Our results highlight important intended and unintended consequences of a well-intentioned public policy"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

There are very large literatures in public health and economics on the effects of workplace smoking bans, with most studies relying on cross-sectional variation. We provide new quasi-experimental evidence on the effects of workplace bans by using the differential timing of adoption of over 100 very strong local smoking by-laws in Ontario, Canada over the period 1997-2004. We employ restricted-use repeated cross section geocoded outcome data to estimate reduced form models that control for demographic characteristics, year fixed effects, and county fixed effects. We first show that the effects of the local laws on actual worksite smoking policy (i.e. the "first stage") were not uniform; specifically, local laws were only effective at increasing ban presence among blue collar workers. Among blue collar workers, adoption of a local by-law significantly reduced the fraction of worksites without any smoking restrictions (i.e. where smoking is allowed anywhere at work) by over half. The differential effect of local policies also improved health outcomes: we find that adoption of a local by-law significantly reduced SHS exposure among blue collar workers by 25-30 percent, and we confirm that workplace smoking laws reduce smoking. We find plausibly smaller and insignificant estimates for white collar and sales/service workers -- the vast majority of whom worked in workplaces with privately initiated smoking bans well before local by-laws were adopted. Overall our findings advance the literature by confirming that workplace smoking bans reduce smoking, documenting the underlying mechanisms through which local smoking by-laws improve health outcomes, and showing that the effects of these laws are strongly heterogeneous with respect to occupation.

AbstractOn April 1, 1994, Ontario, Canada, instituted a new graduated driver license (GDL) system that effectively set the legal blood alcohol content (BAC) threshold at zero for the first few years of a youth's driving eligibility. I use data from the 1983–2001 Ontario Student Drug Use Surveys (OSDUS) to examine whether the Zero Tolerance (ZT) policy reduced self‐reported drinking and alcohol‐involved driving among youth. I find that rates of drunk driving reported by 16‐ to 17‐year‐olds—who faced new, lower legal limits after adoption of the ZT policy—were about 5 percentage points lower after the law was implemented. Visual inspection of the data, however, shows that the estimated reduction is an artifact of a pre‐existing trend: Drunk driving rates in this age group were falling steadily throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. Estimates that account for this pre‐existing trend or that consider shorter windows around the 1994 implementation date return effects on alcohol‐involved driving that are either small and statistically insignificant or large and implausibly signed (positive). These null findings are robust to using the associated change in outcomes for slightly younger (14–15) or slightly older (19–20) youths as controls in a difference‐in‐differences framework. I similarly find no robust effect on drinking participation. This suggests that Ontario's age‐targeted drunk driving law—despite being harsher than similar policies in the United States—was not responsible for reductions in Canadian youth road fatalities over the past two decades. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management

Using independent data from the Centers for Disease Control, the author tests a key assumption of previous research on gay and lesbian incomes: that same‐sex unmarried partner households are, indeed, gay or lesbian. The author shows that this independent data suffers from less severe underreporting of same‐sex unmarried partner households than the 1990 Decennial Census. Furthermore, individual level information on sexual behavior and family planning is used to show that these households exhibit sexual behavior that is systematically different from married and different‐sex couples and that is consistent with a large body of public health and HIV literature on gay men and lesbians. Finally, the author replicates, confirms, and extends previously published Census‐based results on the household income penalty faced by gay male couples, showing that these results are not an artifact of deficient data. He finds similar results for lesbian couples. (JEL J1, J3)

Abstract.  We provide the first evidence on sexual orientation and economic outcomes in Canada using confidential data that ask adults a direct question about their sexual orientation. Gay men have 12% lower personal incomes and lesbians have 15% higher personal incomes than otherwise similar heterosexual men and women, respectively. Different labour force patterns can account for some of the income differentials. We also document large differences in educational attainment, childrearing, and urbanicity that generally mirror patterns found in the US. Finally, we show that applying couples‐based approaches common in this literature greatly overstates the magnitudes of gay/straight income gaps.

Abstract
Over the past two decades, states have toughened their adult drunk driving laws by setting the legal blood alcohol content (BAC) threshold at .08, down from .10. Although several studies have shown that these laws have been effective at reducing alcohol-related traffic fatalities, there is very little evidence on the underlying behavioral mechanisms through which .08 BAC laws achieve the fatality reductions. We estimate reduced form models of the effects of .08 BAC laws on a wide range of self-reported alcohol-related risk behaviors using large samples from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and the National Surveys on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) from 1999-2003 – a period when 32 states' .08 BAC laws went into effect. Models with state and year fixed effects provide no evidence that .08 BAC laws reduced alcohol-involved driving, and we similarly find no effects on drinking participation or the likelihood of binge drinking. We do find robust evidence, however, that .08 BAC laws reduced past month alcohol consumption among moderate drinking males by about five percent. These reductions are larger for older, college educated, and married men. Taken together with results from previous research on other drunk driving interventions, our findings confirm a general deterrence effect and suggest that tougher drunk driving laws work primarily by reducing alcohol consumption.