Health Economics.

• Position: Bureau News

The NBER's Program on Health Economics met in Cambridge on April 7. Program Director Michael Grossman and NBER Research Associate Ted Joyce organized the program, at which these papers were discussed:

Christopher Carpenter, University of California, Irvine, "How Do Workplace Smoking Laws Work?"

John Vernon, University of Connecticut and NBER, and Rexford Santerre, University of Connecticut, "Consumer Welfare Implications of the Nursing Home Ownership Mix"

Carlos Dobkin, University of California, Santa Cruz and NBER, and Steven Puller, Texas A&M University, "The Effects of Government Transfers on Monthly Cycles of Drug Abuse, Crime, and Mortality"

Douglas Almond, Columbia University and NBER, and Bhashkar Mazumder, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, "How Did Compulsory Schooling Reduce Mortality Risk Among the Elderly?"

William N. Evans, University of Maryland and NBER, and Heng Wei, University of Maryland, "Postpartum Hospital Stay and the Outcomes of Mothers and Newborns"

Jens Ludwig, Georgetown University and NBER; Dave Marcotte, University of Maryland; and Karen Norberg, Washington University and NBER, "Anti-Depressants and Suicide"

A large literature shows that state and local laws requiring smoke-free workplaces are associated with improved worker outcomes (lower secondhand smoke exposure and own smoking rates.) Carpenter provides new quasi-experimental evidence on the effects of workplace smoking laws by using the differential timing of adoption of over 100 local smoking by-laws in Ontario, Canada over the period 1997-2004. He is able to control for demographic characteristics, year fixed effects, and county fixed effects. Because he observes the respondent's report of the smoking policy at her worksite, he can test directly for compliance. Although the results indicate that local by-laws increase workplace bans in the aggregate, Carpenter finds that the effects are driven entirely by blue collar workers. Among blue collar workers, local by-laws significantly reduced the fraction of worksites without any smoking restrictions (that is, where smoking is allowed anywhere at work), by over half. These local policies also improved health outcomes: adoption of a local by-law significantly reduced second hand smoke exposure among blue collar workers, by 25-30 percent, and workplace smoking laws did reduce smoking. For all of the outcomes, Carpenter finds plausibly smaller and insignificant estimates for white collar and sales/service workers...