No abstract

I thank the William T. Grant Foundation for funding, Farasat Bokhari and Cagatay Koc for detailed suggestions, and other participants in a session at the 2006 Southern Economic Association meetings for helpful comments. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) 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 peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Many states have passed child access prevention (CAP) laws, which hold the gun owner responsible if a child gains access to a gun that is not securely stored. Previous research on CAP laws has focused exclusively on gun‐related deaths even though most gun injuries are not fatal. We use annual hospital discharge data to investigate whether CAP laws are associated with decreased nonfatal gun injuries. Results from Poisson regressions that control for various hospital, county, and state characteristics, including state‐specific fixed effects and time trends, indicate that CAP laws are associated with reductions in nonfatal gun injuries among children under age 18. Our results are bolstered by the absence of effects on other outcomes such as self‐inflicted gun injuries among adults and nongun self‐inflicted injuries.

The relationship between cocaine prices and crime has critical implications for U.S. drug policy, but is theoretically indeterminate because cocaine price changes affect crime through changes in both cocaine consumption and expenditures. This paper investigates this relationship in annual data from 1981–95 on 29 large U.S. cities, accounting for simultaneity by using two‐stage least squares with measures of wholesale supply factors and retail enforcement intensity as instruments for cocaine prices. Controlling for prices of other drugs, deterrence, socioeconomic factors, and city and year‐specific effects, a strong negative relationship exists between cocaine prices and six of seven FBI index crimes.

This paper examines the relationship that social fraternity and sorority membership has with binge drinking incidence and frequency among 18-24 year old full-time four-year college students who participated in the 1995 National College Health Risk Behavior Survey. To net out unobserved heterogeneity, several measures of situational and total alcohol use are entered into the regressions as explanatory variables. Fraternity membership coefficients are substantially reduced in size, but remain large and highly significant, suggesting a causal effect on binge drinking. Otherwise, the estimates identify idiosyncratic selection into fraternities and binge drinking across students with similar overall drinking profiles. Particularly notable is that behavior by underage students appears to drive the relationship.* Department of Economics, University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Ave., BSN 3403, Tampa, FL 33620-5500; Phone: (813) 974-6514; E-mail: jdesimon@coba.usf.edu. I thank Joseph Newhouse and two anonymous referees for helpful suggestions.