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Title: Econometric Approaches to Public Health Policy: Behavioral Response to Substance Use Regulations
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Welding, Kevin
Econometric Approaches to Public Health Policy: Behavioral Response to Substance Use Regulations
Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2014
Cohort(s): NLSY97
Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)
Keyword(s): Alcohol Use; Drug Use; Gender Differences; Substance Use

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

The third chapter, entitled "The Substitutability of Alcohol and Marijuana: Where there is Smoke, is there Fire?," uses data from the 2002-2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health to investigate recent evidence from a regression discontinuity framework that alcohol and marijuana are substitutes for young adults. The central assumption underlying this method is that the model correctly specifies the smooth function of the forcing variable, in this case, age. I consider a wide variety of parametric and nonparametric models to test the robustness of the discontinuous effect found for marijuana use at the minimum legal drinking age (MLDA). The recent finding that alcohol and marijuana are substitutes is sensitive to specification choice for the whole sample. Regardless of the specification there is no evidence of a significant change in marijuana use by men, while the substitution effect for women is robust. I corroborate and investigate the gender difference using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 Cohort (NLSY97). I find that the reduction in marijuana use at the MLDA by women is heterogeneous by education and race. There is also evidence of a complementary relationship between alcohol and marijuana use for parts of the male sample.
Bibliography Citation
Welding, Kevin. Econometric Approaches to Public Health Policy: Behavioral Response to Substance Use Regulations. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2014.