Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have passed laws that allow individuals to use marijuana for medical purposes. In this paper, I use marijuana possession arrests and treatment referrals by medical professionals to estimate the impact of medical marijuana laws on marijuana usage among non-patients. I find that these laws increase marijuana arrests among adult males by about 20%. The...

Population Aging, Elderly Migration and Education Spending: Intergenerational Conflict Revisited Elderly have been increasingly targeted as a group to enhance economic development and the tax base in communities. While recent literature on elderly migration tends to focus on how elderly migration patterns are influenced by state fiscal variables, the reverse effect from elderly population on fi...

We examine ill-health retirement of police officers in England and Wales between 2002-3 and 200910. Differences in ill-health retirement rates across forces are statistically related to area-specific stresses of policing and force-specific differences in human resources policies. Reforms to police pension plans – in particular a shift in the incidence of financing ill-health retirement from cen...

Everybody Needs Good Neighbours? Evidence from Students’ Outcomes in England We estimate the effect of neighbours’ characteristics and prior achievements on teenage students’ educational and behavioural outcomes using census data on several cohorts of secondary school students in England. Our research design is based on changes in neighbourhood composition caused explicitly by residential migra...

The Effect of School Construction on Test Scores, School Enrollment, and Home Prices This paper provides new evidence on the effect of school construction projects on home prices, academic achievement, and public school enrollment. Taking advantage of the staggered implementation of a comprehensive school construction project in a poor urban district, we find that, by six years after building o...

The foster care system attempts to prepare children and youth who have suffered child maltreatment for successful adult lives. This study documents the economic advantages of a privately funded foster care program that provided longer term, more intensive, and more expensive services compared to public programs. The study found significant differences in major adult educational, health, and soc...

This paper investigates the determinants of public pension plan risk-taking behavior using the percentage of total plan assets invested in the equity markets and the pension asset beta as measures of investment risk. We find that government accounting standards strongly affect public fund investment risk, as higher return assumptions (used to discount pension liabilities) are associated with hi...

This paper studies public sector pension obligations, the biggest fiscal challenge currently facing many US cities. Employing a regression discontinuity design around close elections, benefit payments out of city’s pensions are shown to grow faster under Democratic party mayors, while contributions into do not. Previous research showed that parties not matter for wide range cities’ expenditures...

While a growing literature shows that women, relative to men, prefer greater investment in children, it is unclear whether empowering women produces better economic outcomes. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation US suffrage laws, we show exposure during childhood led large increases educational attainment for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, especially Blacks and Southern Whites. We...