No abstract

This article estimates equations for past year cocaine and marijuana use among adult and juvenile respondents of the 1990–97 National Household Surveys on Drug Abuse. Unlike most previous studies, we control for the monetary price of marijuana, probabilities of arrest for marijuana and cocaine possession, and state fixed effects. Results indicate that cocaine prices are inversely related to adult cocaine and marijuana demand but are unrelated to juvenile drug demand, marijuana price effects are always statistically insignificant, estimated price effects are inflated when state effects are omitted, and increases in each arrest probability diminish both types of drug use.

Federal "No Child Left Behind" legislation, which enables students of low-performing schools to exercise public school choice, exemplies a widespread belief that competing for students will spur public schools to higher achievement. We investigate how the introduction of school choice in North Carolina, via a dramatic increase in the number of charter schools across the state, affects the performance of traditional public schools on statewide tests. We find test score gains from competition that are robust to a variety of specifications. The introduction of charter school competition causes an approximate one percent increase in the score, which constitutes about one quarter of the average yearly growth.