CES-WP-08-35
The Effects of Smoking in Young Adulthood on Smoking and Health Later in Life: Evidence Based on the Vietnam Era Draft Lottery
Daniel Eisenberg, Brian Rowe
September 01, 2008
An important, unresolved question for health policymakers and consumers is whether
cigarette smoking in young adulthood has significant lasting effects into later adulthood. The
Vietnam era draft lottery offers an opportunity to address this question, because it randomly
assigned young men to be more likely to experience conditions favoring cigarette consumption,
including highly subsidized prices. Using this natural experiment, we find that military service
increased the probability of smoking by 35 percentage points as of 1978-80, when men in the
relevant cohorts were aged 25-30, but later in adulthood this effect was substantially attenuated
and did not lead to large negative health effects.
39 Pages 269602 Bytes
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CES-WP-08-34
The Green Industry: An Examination of Environmental Products Manufacturing
Randy Becker, Ronald Shadbegian
September 01, 2008
The “green industry” is often noted in discussions of the costs and benefits of
environmental policy, and it has been characterized as a unique industry with substantial
potential for employment growth, well-paying jobs, and export opportunities. In this paper, we
examine the characteristics and recent economic performance of the green industry, using
establishment-level data on environmental products manufacturers (EPMs) from the 1995
Survey of Environmental Products and Services, together with data from the Annual Survey of
Manufactures and various Census of Manufactures. Results suggest that there are some
differences between EPMs and their non-EPM counterparts in the same industry, in terms of
employment, employee compensation, exports, and productivity. However, we do not find any
evidence that EPMs performed any better than otherwise similar plants, in terms of survival,
employment growth, wage growth, and export growth. Our findings offer a more complex and
nuanced portrayal of the green industry than is typical, and we suggest that this industry may not
be as exceptional as is sometimes maintained.
39 Pages 246759 Bytes
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CES-WP-08-33
Productivity Dispersion and Input Prices: The Case of Electricity
Steven Davis, Cheryl Grim, John Haltiwanger
September 01, 2008
We exploit a rich new database on Prices and Quantities of Electricity in Manufacturing
(PQEM) to study electricity productivity in the U.S. manufacturing sector. The database contains
nearly 2 million customer-level observations (i.e., manufacturing plants) from 1963 to 2000. It
allows us to construct plant-level measures of price paid per kWh, output per kWh, output per
dollar spent on electric power and labor productivity. Using this database, we first document
tremendous dispersion among U.S. manufacturing plants in electricity productivity measures and
a strong negative relationship between price per kWh and output per kWh hour within narrowly
defined industries. Using an IV strategy to isolate exogenous price variation, we estimate that the
average elasticity of output per kWh with respect to the price of electricity is about 0.6 during
the period from 1985 to 2000. We also develop evidence that this price-physical efficiency
tradeoff is stronger for industries with bigger electricity cost shares. Finally, we develop
evidence that stronger competitive pressures in the output market lead to less dispersion among
manufacturing plants in price per kWh and in electricity productivity measures. The strength of
competition effects on dispersion is similar for electricity productivity and labor productivity.
41 Pages 323005 Bytes
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CES-WP-08-32
A Comparison of Employee Benefits Data from the MEPS-IC and Form 5500
Kristin McCue
September 01, 2008
This paper compares data on employers’ health and pension offerings from the two
sources: publicly available administrative data from Form 5500 filings and survey data from the
Insurance Component of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS-IC). The basic findings
are that the 5500 filings cover too few health plans to be very useful as a substitute or
supplement to the MEPS-IC measure of whether or not employers offer health insurance. The
pension information in the 5500 filings is potentially more useful as a supplement to the MEPSIC
for research purposes where additional pension information would be useful in studying
employers’ decisions to offer health insurance.
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18 Pages 382235 Bytes
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CES-WP-08-31
The Direct and Indirect Costs of Food Safety Regulation
Michael Ollinger
September 01, 2008
The cost of compliance with the Pathogen Reduction Hazard Analysis Critical Control
Program (PR/HACCP) rule of 1996 has been controversial since it was first proposed. Surveys
have provided some cost information but examined plant size and other indirect effects with
limited data and did not make cost estimates of direct cost components, such as mandated tasks.
This paper addresses those deficiencies with data from a national survey of meat and poultry
plants on PR/HACCP costs. Results indicate that (1) mandated tasks are the most costly
component of the PR/HACCP rule, (2) regulation favors large plants over small ones, and (3)
private actions are nearly as costly as direct regulation.
32 Pages 215283 Bytes
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