This paper provides new evidence on the income elasticity of health care by combining stationarity and cointegration tests of health care expenditure and incomes with estimates of the cointegrating relationship between them. A recently updated dataset of health care expenditures and disposable personal income for the US states for the years 1966-1998 is used. The principal findings are that health care expenditures and incomes at the state level are non-stationary and cointegrated. Dynamic OLS cointegrating regressions of the pooled state time series estimate the income elasticity of health care at 0.817 to 0.844, well below unity, confirming that health care expenditure, even at the aggregate level, is a necessity good.

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Okun's Law is one of the most enduring stylistic facts in macroeconomics. This article uses new developments in trend/cycle decomposition to test Okun's Law for a panel of ten industrial countries, finding that Okun's original estimate for the U.S. of three points of real GDP growth for each one percent reduction in the unemployment rate now averages just under two points of real GDP growth for the sample countries. Pooled estimates for Europe are smaller than estimates for the rest of the sample. Also, this article finds that omission of capital and labor inputs may have biased previous estimates.

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"This article reexamines the effectiveness of blood alcohol content (BAC) laws in reducing traffic fatalities. Differences-in-differences estimators of U.S. state-level data with standard errors corrected for autocorrelation show no evidence that lowering the BAC limits to 0.08 g/dL reduced fatality rates, either in total or in crashes likely to be alcohol related, or in states that passed BAC 08 in laws either in advance of or in response to federal pressure. Other legislations, including administrative license revocation and primary seat belt laws, are found effective in reducing fatalities in all specifications. Endogeneity tests using event analyses confirm the differences-in-differences estimates. "("JEL" I18, K32) Copyright 2007 Western Economic Association International.