Over the last three decades, ambient concentrations of sulfur dioxide (SO2) air pollution have declined by approximately 80%. This paper tests whether the 1970 Clean Air Act and its subsequent amendments caused this decline. The centerpiece of this legislation is the annual assignment of all counties to SO2 nonattainment or attainment categories. Polluters face stricter regulations in nonattain...

Indebted and Overweight: The Link Between Weight and Household Debt There is a substantial correlation between household debt and bodyweight. Theory suggests that a causal relationship between debt and bodyweight could run in either direction or both could be caused by unobserved common factors. We use OLS and Propensity Score Matching to ascertain if household debt (measured by credit card ind...

This paper uses the 2001 wave of National Drug Strategy Household Survey (NDSHS) to assess the impact of marijuana decriminalization policy on marijuana smoking prevalence in Australia. Both parametric and non-parametric methods are used. The parametric approach postulates an endogenous probit switching model and its nested binary probit, endogenous bivariate probit and two-part models to estim...

This paper examines whether there is a causal relationship from job displacement to all–cause mortality. The hypothesis is tested for all employees who lost their job due to a plant closure in Sweden in 1987 and 1988. The control group is a random sample of all employees who did not experience a plant closure during the mid 1980s. Apart from variables commonly available in such studies (age, se...

This paper examines how collateral and personal guarantees affect firms’ ex-post performance employing a propensity score matching estimation approach. Based on a unique firm-level panel data set of more than 500 small-and-medium-sized borrower firms in Japan, we find that borrowers that provide collateral to lenders experience larger increases in profitability and reductions in riskiness than ...