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I investigate the well-known educational gradient in smoking. It is well established that, at least in recent decades, people with higher levels of education are less likely to smoke and, conditional on being a smoker, are more likely to quit than are people with less education. Using longitudinal data on lifetime smoking histories, I explore whether the educational gradient changes when one accounts for differences in the amount of information smokers have about the health risks associated with smoking. At the core of the analysis is a new way to measure not only the flow of information a person receives but also a person’s stock of information in any year. I construct measures of the stock and flow of information with consumer magazine articles that discuss cigarette smoking and health. To calculate exposure, I predict individuals’ reading of particular magazines and link predicted exposure to data on individual smoking status in every year of life. The analysis sample includes many individuals who started smoking in the 1930s and 1940s – well before scientific evidence had accumulated. After replicating the education gradient in terms of smoking cessation, I show that it is mostly explained by the interaction between educational attainment and the stock of knowledge individuals possess. The findings suggest that education affects whether and how a stock of health risk information induces people to quit smoking.

We use Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF) data from the United States and Great Britain to investigate the association between adults’ health and the income inequality they experienced as children up to 80 years earlier. Our inequality data track shares of national income held by top income percentiles from the early 20th century. We average those data over the same early-life years and merge them to CNEF data from both countries that measure self-reported health of individuals between 1991 and 2007. Observationally, adult men and women in the United States and Great Britain less often report being in better health if inequality was higher in their first five years of life. Although the trend in inequality is similar in both countries over the past century, the empirical association between health and inequality in the United States differs substantially from the estimated relationship in Great Britain. When we control for demographic characteristics, measures of permanent income, and early-life socio-economic status, the health–inequality association remains robust only in the U.S. sample. For the British sample, the added controls drive the coefficient on inequality toward zero and statistical insignificance.

Health information drives crucial consumer health decisions and plays a central role in healthcare markets. Consumers who are better-informed about smoking, diet, and physical activity make healthier choices outside the healthcare sector (Kenkel, 1991; Ippolito & Mathios, 1990, 1995; Meara, 2001). Better-informed consumers also interact differently with physicians and other healthcare providers (e.g., Cutler, Landrum, & Stewart, 2006). In addition to the immediate consequences for individual consumers, health economists have long recognized that information also has broader implications for principal–agent relationships and the functioning of healthcare markets.¹ More recent lines of research in health economics and medical sociology emphasize the potential role of consumer information in explaining health disparities associated with socioeconomic status (Deaton, 2002; Goldman & Lakdawalla, 2001; Glied & Lleras-Muney, 2003; Link & Phelan, 1995). Both health economists and medical sociologists stress that because of disparities in consumer information, rapid medical progress tends to be accompanied by increased disparities in medical treatment and health outcomes.

We model the conditions under which parents optimally reallocate time to childcare when an outside agent exogenously restricts the number of hours an employer can demand of a working parent. Theoretically, when the restriction binds, a parent's available time increases. We exploit a series of voluntary and mandated labor-market reforms in South Korea that regulated the statutory and maximum work hours of parents. The government implemented the laws in stages by industry and size of firms. This implementation process generates exogenous variation across families where one or both partners worked at jobs that were or were not affected by the reform. We show the reforms affected work hours and use the predicted changes to investigate the total amount they spent on paid childcare and whether or not they changed the relative use of market and parental care. When fathers get more time (work less), parents spend less money on childcare. A change in mother's work time does not affect expenditures. When parents get more time, they are more likely to spend money on paid childcare for school-age children and more likely to use private academies.

We develop and test a pricing model for a monopolist that sells an addictive good. The model illustrates the conditions under which a monopolist lowers the price he charges youth when a future tax is imposed. Using household survey data, we investigate whether individuals use “cents-off” coupons in a way consistent with the price discrimination implied by the model. We find evidence that all smokers, not just the young, are more likely to use coupons prior to a tax increase if they are exposed to more advertising. With our data we cannot test whether cigarette manufacturers selectively offer youth price discounts in other ways.