Does smoking make you dumb?

Perhaps the answer is ‘yes’. A paper by Gao et al. (2020) attempts to answer that question. We identify a positive causal effect of healthy working environments on corporate innovation, using the staggered passage of U.S. state-level laws that ban smoking in workplaces. We find a significant increase in patents and patent citations for firms…

Can legalizing marijuana save lives?

In recent years, a number of states have legalized medical marijuana. While marijuana may not be good for you, can it be used as a substitute for more dangerous substances such as prescription opioids and heroin? To use an analogy, perhaps marijuana is to vaping ans opioids/heroin are to smoking. In fact, a recent paper…

Oakland’s Creative Revenue Generator

California is known for beautiful beaches, Hollywood, and sublime parks.  In this post, however, I will discuss two other things for which California has recently become famous.   Marijuana.  Here in California, medical marijuana is legal.  Based on my unscientific of pedestrians on a variety of U.S. regions, northern California also has the most lax…