Previous studies have shown that adolescent religious participation is negatively associated with risky health behaviors such as cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, and illicit drug use. One explanation for these findings is that religion directly reduces risky behaviors because churches provide youths with moral guidance or with strong social networks that reinforce social norms. An alternative explanation is that both religious participation and risky health behaviors are driven by some common unobserved individual trait. We use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and implement an instrumental variables approach to identify the effect of religious participation on smoking, binge drinking, and marijuana use. Following Gruber (2005), we use a county-level measure of religious market density as an instrument. We find that religious market density has a strong positive association with adolescent religious participation, but not with secular measures of social capital. Upon accounting for unobserved heterogeneity, we find that religious participation continues to have a significant negative effect on illicit drug use. On the contrary, the estimated effects of attendance in instrumental variables models of binge drinking and smoking are statistically imprecise.

Rent seeking, Experiment, Rent dissipation, Political competition, C91, D72,

This research studies the impact of changes to judicial discretion on criminal sentencing outcomes. The 2003 Feeney Amendment restricted federal judges' ability to impose sentences outside of the Sentencing Guidelines and required appellate courts to review downward departures. Using data on all federal sentences between 1999 and 2004, we show that the amendment reduced downward departures by 5 percent. Controlling for characteristics of the crime and the offender, we find that the Amendment increased average prison sentences by about two months. There is no evidence that judges adjusted offense levels or criminal history in order to circumvent the Amendment.

U.S. markets for outpatient substance abuse treatment (OSAT) include for‐profit, nonprofit, and public clinics. We study OSAT provision using new methods on equilibrium market structure in differentiated product markets. This allows us to describe clinics as heterogeneous in their objectives, their responses to exogenous market characteristics, and their responses to one another. Consistent with crowding out of private treatment, we find that markets with public clinics are less likely to have private clinics. In markets with low insurance coverage, low incomes, or high shares of nonwhite addicts, however, public clinics are relatively likely to be the sole willing providers of OSAT.