Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, May 1, 2019
von Haefen, and participants in the ASU environmental economics conference, a Cornel University (... more von Haefen, and participants in the ASU environmental economics conference, a Cornel University (Dyson School) seminar, Camp Resources, and a GSU workshop for helpful comments. We also thank Mark Jacobsen for sharing and explaining the data and code used to create the instrument based on Bento et al. (2009). We thank the staff at the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) for assistance in obtaining the confidential NHTS data files. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
The impact of WIC participation on tobacco use and alcohol consumption
Contemporary Economic Policy
The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program provide... more The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program provides food coupons and health benefits to foster in utero and postpartum development of the child. However, due to these benefits, households might reallocate income from food and healthcare services toward other goods. Utilizing data from the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, this article investigates the effects of participation in the WIC program on cigarette and alcohol consumption. Our results indicate that the program has no effect on prenatal smoking but increases postpartum cigarette consumption per day by 6%. WIC also has preventive benefits as it decreases prenatal alcohol consumption on the extensive and intensive margins.
Matchmaking between vehicle miles traveled and fuel economy : the role of gasoline prices
This paper studies a potential e ect of gasoline prices that has been overlooked in the literatur... more This paper studies a potential e ect of gasoline prices that has been overlooked in the literature. Due to heterogeneity in demand for vehicle miles traveled (VMT), when gasoline prices increase, the increased cost of operating an ine cient vehicle are greater for households that drive more. Thus, in equilibrium, after an increase in the gasoline prices there should be a stronger matching from households, based on their VMT, to the fuel economy of the cars they own. Potentially, this matching e ect could save 15% of US gasoline consumption, even with no e ect on individual VMT and no e ect on the vehicle eet. Using con dential data from the National Highway Transportation Survey, the e ect of higher gasoline prices on such assortative matching is estimated using a variety of econometric models. For all the di erent model speci cations, the matching e ect is signi cant and quite robust. This is the rst study to analyze this re-allocation or matching e ect. JEL classi cation codes: D1...
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of interstate highway building on school ... more The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of interstate highway building on school segregation in US cities. The simple ordinary least squares (OLS) model might suffer from endogeneity bias and therefore an instrumental variables (IV) model is employed to account for endogeneity of highway routes. Dissimilarity and interaction indices are used to measure segregation and the results of the OLS and IV models indicate that school segregation increased due to the additions to the highway system. The estimates suggest that highways can explain 7-10% of the variation in school segregation.
von Haefen, and participants in the ASU environmental economics conference, a Cornel University (... more von Haefen, and participants in the ASU environmental economics conference, a Cornel University (Dyson School) seminar, Camp Resources, and a GSU workshop for helpful comments. We also thank Mark Jacobsen for sharing and explaining the data and code used to create the instrument based on Bento et al. (2009). We thank the staff at the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) for assistance in obtaining the confidential NHTS data files. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
The main purpose of introducing an environmental information disclosure strategy is to reduce inf... more The main purpose of introducing an environmental information disclosure strategy is to reduce informational asymmetries and put pressure on firms to reduce emissions. This paper studies the impact of such a policy on air quality in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. A regression discontinuity design is employed and the results show that pollutant concentration levels were not significantly affected after the implementation of the policy. Empirically, the estimates of the effects under the discontinuity-based OLS model have the opposite sign for some of the pollutants relative to the estimates from the basic OLS model. Therefore, basing conclusions on the OLS results will engender incorrect inference. Discontinuity-based results are robust to different model specifications.
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Papers by Taha Kasim