Benjamin Hansen

Medical Marijuana Laws, Traffic Fatalities, and Alcohol Consumption

To date, 19 states have passed medical marijuana laws, yet very little is known about their effects. The current study examines the relationship between the legalization of medical marijuana and traffic fatalities, the leading cause of death among Americans ages 5–34. The first full year after coming into effect, legalization is associated with an 8–11 percent decrease in traffic fatalities. The impact of legalization on traffic fatalities involving alcohol is larger and estimated with more precision than its impact on traffic fatalities that do not involve alcohol. Legalization is also associated with sharp decreases in the price of marijuana and alcohol consumption, which suggests that marijuana and alcohol are substitutes. Because alternative mechanisms cannot be ruled out, the negative relationship between legalization and alcohol-related traffic fatalities does not necessarily imply that driving under the influence of marijuana is safer than driving under the influence of alcohol.

Life and Death in the Fast Lane: Police Enforcement and Traffic Fatalities

This paper estimates the causal effect of police on traffic fatalities and injuries. Due to simultaneity, estimating the causal effect of police on crime is often difficult. We overcome this obstacle by focusing on a mass layoff of Oregon State Police in February of 2003, stemming from changes in property tax assessment in the prior decade. Due solely to budget cuts, 35 percent of the roadway troopers were laid off, which dramatically reduced citations. The subsequent decrease in enforcement is associated with a significant increase in injuries and fatalities, with the strongest effects under fair weather conditions outside of city-limits where state police employment levels are most relevant. The effects are similar using control groups chosen either geographically or through data-driven methods. Our estimates suggest that a highway fatality can be prevented with

The minimum dropout age and student victimization

309,000 of expenditures on state police.

Have Cigarette Taxes Lost Their Bite? New Estimates of the Relationship between Cigarette Taxes and Youth Smoking

Over the years, the minimum dropout age has been raised to 18 in 21 states. Although these policy changes are promoted for their educational benefits, they have been shown to reduce crimes committed by youths in the affected age groups. However, an unintended consequence of increasing the minimum dropout age could be the displacement of crime from the streets to schools. We use data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveys to estimate the relationship between minimum dropout age laws and student victimization. Our results suggest that higher minimum dropout ages increase the likelihood that females and younger students report missing school for fear of their safety and younger students are more likely to report being threatened or injured with a weapon on school property. Our results also yield some evidence that students are more likely to report being victims of in-school theft when the minimum dropout age is higher.

California's 2004 Workers' Compensation Reform: Costs, Claims, and Contingent Workers

Using data from the state and national Youth Risk Behavior Surveys for the period 1991–2005, Carpenter and Cook (2008) find a strong, negative relationship between cigarette taxes and youth smoking. We revisit this relationship using four extra waves of YRBS data (from 2007, 2009, 2011, and 2013). Our results suggest that youths have become much less responsive to cigarette taxes since 2005. In fact, we find little evidence of a negative relationship between cigarette taxes and youth smoking when we restrict our attention to the period 2007–13. We conclude that policy makers interested in reducing youth smoking may have to adopt alternative strategies.

The Effect of Business Cycles on Educational Attainment

The large excess fraction of difficult-to-diagnose injuries that occur on a Monday was originally thought to reflect employees’ use of workers’ compensation to cover weekend injuries. Evidence has not necessarily supported this notion, however. Substantial reforms in California in 2004 have made filing false workers’ compensation claims more difficult and less attractive because of reduced benefits. The author empirically tests the effects of the reforms using 2002 to 2006 workers’ compensation claims from a nationwide firm that contracts temporary staffing, an industry with pronounced asymmetric information. He finds strong evidence that claim rates and costs fell following the reforms, and that the fraction of claims on Monday for difficult-to-diagnose injuries dropped by 7 percentage points in California—with no change for the firm’s branches in other states. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that false claims explain a part of the Monday effect, at least in industries with substantial asymmetric information. That being said, when taking into account the effects of the reforms on claim costs and overall claim rates, the excess number of Monday claims makes up less than 4% of the cost reductions after the reforms.

Legal access to alcohol and criminality

This paper studies the impact of fluctuations in unemployment rates before high school graduation, at age 17, on educational attainment. We hypothesize that schooling decisions are counter-cyclical, but that the impact of higher unemployment rates varies over the ability distribution, as measured by the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT). Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY79), combined with information on national unemployment rates, we find support for this hypothesis. Specifically, we find that higher unemployment rates at age 17 increase completed years of education and the probability of college graduation for individuals in the 60th-80th quintile of the AFQT distribution. We find no evidence that higher unemployment rates are related to the probability of high school graduation.

When Good Measurement Goes Wrong

Previous research has found strong evidence that legal access to alcohol is associated with sizable increases in criminality. We revisit this relationship using the census of judicial records on criminal charges filed in Oregon Courts, the ability to separately track crimes involving firearms, and to track individuals over time. We find that crime increases at age 21, with increases mostly due to assaults that lack premeditation, and alcohol-related nuisance crimes. We find no evident increases in rape or robbery. Among those with no prior criminal records, increases in crime are 50% larger-still larger for the most socially costly crimes of assault and drunk driving.

California’s 2004 Workers’ Compensation Reform

Hoffman’s (2015) replication of Sabia, Burkhauser, and Hansen (SBH 2012) suggests that “unlucky” measurement error in low-skilled employment in the Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Groups (CPS-ORG) led SBH to produce upwardly biased estimates of the labor demand effects of the 2005 to 2006 New York State minimum wage increase. This study replicates Hoffman’s preferred policy estimates from the full CPS and finds evidence that the parallel trends assumption underlying his difference-in-difference approach is violated. When a synthetic control state with pretreatment employment trends similar to those in New York is constructed, this study estimates a relatively large negative employment elasticity with respect to the minimum wage for low-skilled individuals (–0.5), similar to the estimate SBH obtained using the CPS-ORG (–0.6).

The Unintended Consequences of 'Ban the Box': Statistical Discrimination and Employment Outcomes When Criminal Histories Are Hidden

The large excess fraction of difficult-to-diagnose injuries that occur on a Monday was originally thought to reflect employees’ use of workers’ compensation to cover weekend injuries. Evidence has not necessarily supported this notion, however. Substantial reforms in California in 2004 have made filing false workers’ compensation claims more difficult and less attractive because of reduced benefits. The author empirically tests the effects of the reforms using 2002 to 2006 workers’ compensation claims from a nationwide firm that contracts temporary staffing, an industry with pronounced asymmetric information. He finds strong evidence that claim rates and costs fell following the reforms, and that the fraction of claims on Monday for difficult-to-diagnose injuries dropped by 7 percentage points in California—with no change for the firm’s branches in other states. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that false claims explain a part of the Monday effect, at least in industries with substantial asymmetric information. That being said, when taking into account the effects of the reforms on claim costs and overall claim rates, the excess number of Monday claims makes up less than 4% of the cost reductions after the reforms.