unemployment drugs and attitudes among european youth this paper studies changes in the patterns of drug consumption and attitudes towards drugs in relation to sky high youth unemployment rates brought about by the great recession our analysis is based on data for 28 european countries that refer to young people we find that the consumption of cannabis and new substances is positively related to increasing unemployment rates an increase of 1 in the regional unemployment rate is associated with an increase of 0 7 percentage points in the ratio of young people who state that they have consumed cannabis at some point in time our findings also indicate that higher unemployment may be associated with more young people perceiving that access to drugs has become more difficult particularly access to ecstasy cocaine and heroin according to young europeans when the economy worsens anti drug policies should focus on the reduction of poverty and unemployment and not on implementing tougher measures against users

wage and employment growth in america s drug epidemic is all growth created equal the rise in drug overdose deaths in the united states since the turn of the millennium has been extraordinary a popular narrative paints a picture whereby opioid overdoses among white male less educated rural workers have been caused by reduced economic opportunities borne by such people in this article we causally test the validity of this theory by using bartik type variables to explore the relationship between local economic conditions and county opioid overdose death rates we add to the literature by exploring how both employment and wage growth in different types of industries are related to opioid overdose deaths for the population as a whole as well as for rural vs urban male vs female and white vs black populations we find mixed evidence our results confirm that wage and employment growth in industries more likely to employ low skill workers are important protective factors for rural white males however we also find evidence that economic improvements in low skill industries are just as important in protecting blacks and women against opioid overdoses and for workers in metro counties we also find evidence that employment growth in high paying industries has led to increases in opioid overdoes rates

who pays the bar tab beer consumption and economic growth in the united states what drug provides americans with the greatest pleasure and the greatest pain the answer hands down is alcohol the pain comes not only from drunk driving and lost lives but also addiction family strife crime violence poor health and squandered human potential young and old drinkers and abstainers alike all are affected every american is paying for alcohol abuse phillip j cook paying the tab the costs and benefits of alcohol control 2007 i introduction alcohol consumption has severe social and economic consequences lost productivity disability early death crime family neglect personality deterioration to name a few cook 2007 at the individual level the effects of alcohol consumption have been explored considerably by researchers in different fields including economics medicine public health criminology and sociology however few studies have examined the economic impact of alcohol use at the aggregate level probably due to the research deficiency regarding its aggregate effects some disagreement exists about the overall net benefits of alcohol use on the one hand scholars who have done extensive research on individual outcomes claim that the overall costs of alcohol use outweigh its benefits for example cook and moore 2002 120 state in their review article the production and sale of alcoholic beverages account for a small share of national product in the united states and in other advanced economies however the deleterious effects of alcohol consumption on health and safety constitute a substantial economic burden reducing our overall standard of living on the other hand organizations formed by the producers and distributors of alcoholic beverages claim that the alcoholic beverage industry contributes significantly to the u s economy through job creation and tax revenues according to beer serves america 2011 an organization sponsored by the beer institute and the national beer wholesalers association nbwa directly and indirectly the beer industry employs approximately 1 8 million americans paying them over 71 billion in wages and benefits the industry pays over 44 billion in business personal and consumption taxes including 5 3 billion in excise taxes and 5 8 billion in sales gross receipts and other taxes 1 similarly the distilled spirits council of the united states discus 1999 the national trade association representing america s leading distillers and about 70 of all distilled spirits brands sold in the united states states that the alcohol beverage industry is a major contributor to the u s economy through job creation wages and taxes 2 room and jernigan 2000 point out that the benefits reaped from the alcohol industry in terms of economic development should be weighed against the negative impacts on economic development in addition to public health they go on to say that alcohol s contribution to total production can vary tremendously from country to country generating 3 of total manufacturing value added in argentina or the netherlands but as little as 0 07 in iran aside from the aforementioned contributions of the alcohol industry to the economy often cited by the industry itself supply side efforts also play a role in the consumption of alcohol this can be done through influencing government regulation of the market for alcohol and selling cheap alcohol in bulk which has a devastating public health impact stockwell and crosbie 2001 indeed the economic burden of excessive alcohol consumption has been found to be substantial recently estimated at 223 5 billion bouchery et al 2011 although a few studies have examined the impact of macroeconomic conditions on drinking prevalence and patterns such as those by ruhm and black 2002 and ruhm 1995 we are not aware of any studies exploring the impact of alcohol consumption on economic growth

economic conditions and alcohol problems this study investigates the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and two alcohol related outcomes liquor consumption and highway vehicle fatalities fixed effect models are estimated for the 48 contiguous states over the 1975 1988 time period alcohol consumption and traffic deaths vary procyclically with a major portion of the effect of economic downturns attributed to reductions in incomes rather than employment the intake of hard liquor is the most sensitive to the state of the macroeconomy there is no evidence however that fluctuations in economic conditions have a disproportionate impact on the drunk driving of young adults

the impact of order and mode of market entry on profitability and market share market share performance and profitability of overseas business activities has long been an important issue in international business in this study we explore the impact of order and mode of market entry into an overseas market we find that early entrants have significantly higher market shares and profitability than late followers we also find that equity joint ventures have a higher profitability than either wholly owned operations or contractual joint ventures a significant interaction exists between order and mode of market entry as expected firm efficiency and size affect the performance of firms these results are based on the business activities of a sample of 14 466 foreign firms in china in 1995

much ado about two reconsidering retransformation and the two part model in health econometrics in health economics applications involving outcomes y and covariates x it is often the case that the central inferential problems of interest involve e y x and its associated partial effects or elasticities many such outcomes have two fundamental statistical properties y 0 and the outcome y 0 is observed with sufficient frequency that the zeros cannot be ignored econometrically this paper 1 describes circumstances where the standard two part model with homoskedastic retransformation will fail to provide consistent inferences about important policy parameters and 2 demonstrates some alternative approaches that are likely to prove helpful in applications

does drinking really decrease in bad times this paper investigates the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and drinking using individual level data from 1987 to 1999 interview years of the behavioral risk factor surveillance system brfss we confirm the procyclical variation in overall drinking identified in previous research using aggregate sales data and show that this largely results from changes in consumption by existing drinkers rather than movements into or out of drinking moreover the decrease occurring during bad economic times is concentrated among heavy consumers with light drinking actually rising we also find no evidence that the decline in overall alcohol use masks a rise for persons becoming unemployed during contractions these results suggest that any stress induced increases in drinking during bad economic times are more than offset by declines resulting from changes in economic factors such as lower incomes

new estimates of the optimal tax on alcohol in this paper i use a new data set to estimate the optimal alcohol tax rate as a benchmark the empirical results imply that the optimal tax rate is over 100 percent of the net of tax price however alcohol taxation is a second best solution to the problems associated with alcohol abuse i conclude that the optimal alcohol tax rate would be much lower if punishment for drunk driving were more certain and severe government provision of information about the health consequences of heavy drinking would also remove part of the efficiency rationale for alcohol taxes

a note on economic conditions and alcohol problems this paper reexamines the effect of the business cycle on alcohol consumption using u s state level analysis introduced by rhum ruhm c j 1995 economic conditions and alcohol problems journal of health economics 14 583 603 using an extended panel this analysis finds that ruhm s estimates are biased and inconsistent due to the problem of non stationarity in alcohol consumption and state economic condition time series corrected estimation using logarithmic first differences confirms ruhm s original finding of pro cyclical alcohol consumption but these results unlike ruhm s are robust to sample period

is there a wage bonus from drinking unobserved heterogeneity examined while the result that drinkers earn more than abstainers has been remarkably persistent only one paper in the literature on drinking and earnings has been written where individual fixed effects are included this study improves the current literature by utilizing a much longer panel and focuses on the low end of drinking while controlling for unobserved heterogeneity with the inclusion of individual specific effects it is found that while ols specifications yield a positive significant coefficient on current drinking even when a rich set of covariates is controlled for including individual fixed effects renders the coefficient statistically insignificant

a theory of rational addiction we develop a theory of rational addiction in which rationality means a consistent plan to maximize utility over time strong addiction to a good requires a big effect of past consumption of the good on current consumption such powerful complementarities cause some steady states to be unstable they are an important part of our analysis because even small deviations from the consumption at an unstable steady state can lead to large cumulative rises over time in addictive consumption or to rapid falls in consumption to abstention our theory also implies that cold turkey is used to end strong addictions that addicts often go on binges that addicts respond more to permanent than to temporary changes in prices of addictive goods and that anxiety and tensions can precipitate an addiction

the calculus of consensus democracy rethinking patterns of democracy without veto players we present a theory of comparative political institutions based on the concept of consensus democracy and social choice theory unlike lijphart we argue that consensus democracy is not a special form of democracy characterized by mutual vetoes but rather the simplest form of democracy which we refer to as pr majority rule we construct a typology of political institutions based on differences with this simple model contra tsebelis s veto players approach our theory predicts that pr majority rule should be the most flexible form of democracy we test this with data on overall patterns of government spending and on welfare state reform

mortality and the business cycle evidence from individual and aggregated data there has been much interest recently in the relationship between economic conditions and mortality with some studies showing that mortality is pro cyclical while others find the opposite some suggest that the aggregation level of analysis e g individual vs regional matters we use both individual and aggregated data on a sample of 20 64 year old swedish men from 1993 to 2007 our results show that the association between the business cycle and mortality does not depend on the level of analysis the sign and magnitude of the parameter estimates are similar at the individual level and the aggregate county level both showing pro cyclical mortality

the role of economic shocks on health evidence from german reunification sudden economic shocks impact the everyday lives of people from one day to the next a number of studies have examined the association between economic fluctuations and health however no consensus on the nature of this relationship has been established by exploiting the dramatic economic fluctuations following the german reunification of 1990 which included a sudden change from a socialist to a capitalist system in east germany this study examines the association between broad negative economic shocks and health the article finds that increases in state unemployment rates are associated with large and statistically significant declines in health outcomes estimates are stronger for people who became unemployed shortly after reunification for low income individuals and for east germans a group confronted with larger economic fluctuations when examining potential mechanisms that could explain the observed health deteriorations the study finds significant reductions in exercise frequency and increases in economic uncertainty and overall stress

entrepreneurship culture and the epigenetic revolution a research note we show how the type of alcohol consumed is related to the type of entrepreneurship present for economies in europe we differentiate between beer wine and spirit drinking countries and disting

the lasting effects of leaving school in an economic downturn on alcohol use the author tests whether leaving school in an economic downturn persistently affects alcohol use she models alcohol use in middle age as a function of the state unemployment rate at school leaving in the national longitudinal survey of youth 1979 cohort the results suggest that men but not women who leave school in an economic downturn consume more drinks and are more likely to report heavy and binge drinking than otherwise similar men findings are robust to addressing the endogeneity of the time and location of school leaving and contribute to the literature on the lasting consequences of leaving school in an economic downturn

short run marginal medical costs from booze and butts evidence from the states this article uses a panel data set of u s states over the 1980 to 2007 period to estimate the demands for medical care cigarettes and beer the estimation process generates own price income and cross price elasticities for all three goods implied per capita beer and cigarette consumption elasticities of per capita health care expenditures suggested by our baseline estimates are 0 83 and 0 14 respectively these results are robust to a number of specification tests simulations suggest that yearly marginal medical costs amount to approximately 12 per bottle and 27 cents per cigarette in the short run in 2012 dollars these results are likely to be driven by the much larger corresponding increases in the consumption of binge drinkers and heavy smokers

pro cyclical mortality across socioeconomic groups and health status abstract using variation across geographic regions a number of studies from the u s and other developed countries have found more deaths in economic upturns and less deaths in economic downturns we use data from regions in norway for 1977 2008 and find the same pro cyclical patterns using individual level register data for the identical population we find that disadvantaged socioeconomic groups are not hit harder by pro cyclical mortality than advantaged groups we also find that other indicators of deteriorated health than death like becoming disabled are pro cyclical overall our analysis suggests that pro cyclical mortality is rather related to deaths of people already in deteriorated health than to people of low socioeconomic status

recessions healthy no more abstract over the 1976 2010 period total mortality shifted from strongly procyclical to being weakly or unrelated to macroeconomic conditions the association is likely to be poorly measured when using short less than 15 year analysis periods deaths from cardiovascular disease and transport accidents continue to be procyclical however countercyclical patterns have emerged for fatalities from cancer mortality and external causes among the latter non transport accidents particularly accidental poisonings play an important role

economic upturns are good for your heart but watch out for accidents a study on swedish regional data 1976 2005 this article explores the relationship between the regional unemployment rate in total and cause specific mortality in sweden during 1976 2005 overall mortality is unrelated to changes in the unemployment rate while the biggest cause of death heart disease decreases when the unemployment rate decreases at the same time other accidents including job related accidents increases when the unemployment rate decreases swedish evidence provide no support for the us research findings that short term decreases in the unemployment rate are bad for your health in general

the impact of stock market fluctuations on the mental and physical well being of children the stock market crash of 2008 caused a severe impact to households earlier research has explored the impacts of a stock market crash on life well being psychological stress and adult health behaviors we extend this literature by documenting impacts of stock market fluctuations on a range of child outcomes including effects on both mental and physical health we show a negative effect of a market crash on hospitalizations child reported health status sick days from school and an aggregate health index measure both graphical and regression based analysis reveal that our results are not driven by a preexisting trend of declining child health before the market crash and extensive sensitivity analysis demonstrates that the results are robust to multiple empirical specifications jel i15 e32 j13

the demand for alcohol the differential response to price although several studies indicate that drinking is responsive to price little work has focused on whether prices have a differential effect on light moderate or heavy drinking this study examines the price responsiveness of the demand for alcohol whether heavy drinkers are less sensitive to price than light or moderate drinkers the study uses data on alcohol consumption on the 1983 national health interview survey the results indicate that both light and heavy drinkers are much less price elastic than moderate drinkers further we cannot reject the hypothesis that the very heaviest drinkers have perfectly price inelastic demands