In volume 94 of this REVIEW, Adams, Blackburn, and Cotti (ABC), using Fatal Accident Reporting System data from 1998 to 2006, find that a 10% increase in the minimum wage is associated with a 7% to 11% increase in alcohol-related fatal traffic accidents involving teen drivers. We find this result does not hold when the analysis period is expanded to include 1991 through 2013. In addition, auxiliary analyses provide no support for income-driven increases in alcohol consumption, the primary mechanism posited by ABC. Together, our results suggest that minimum wage increases are not a silent killer.

A new regression-based approach for the estimation of the tail index of heavy-tailed distributions with several important properties is introduced. First, it provides a bias reduction when compared to available regression-based methods; second, it is resilient to the choice of the tail length used for the estimation of the tail index; third, when the effect of the slowly varying function at infinity of the Pareto distribution vanishes slowly, it continues to perform satisfactorily; and fourth, it performs well under dependence of unknown form. An approach to compute the asymptotic variance under time dependence and conditional heteroskcedasticity is also provided.

Governments have used vouchers to spend billions of dollars on private education; much of this has gone to religiously affiliated schools. We explore the possibility that vouchers could alter the financial outcomes of religious organizations that are operating schools and thus have an impact on the spiritual, moral, and social fabric of communities. Using a data set of Catholic parish finances from Milwaukee, we show that vouchers are a dominant source of funding for many churches. Vouchers appear to offer financial stability for congregations as voucher expansion prevents church closures and mergers. However, voucher expansion causes significant declines in church donations and church revenue from noneducational sources.

We attribute the recent quadrupling of heroin death rates to the August 2010 reformulation of an oft-abused prescription opioid, OxyContin. The new abuse-deterrent formulation led many consumers to substitute an inexpensive alternative, heroin. Using structural break techniques and variation in substitution risk, we find that opioid consumption stops rising in August 2010, heroin deaths begin climbing the following month, and growth in heroin deaths was greater in areas with greater prereformulation access to heroin and opioids. The reformulation did not generate a reduction in combined heroin and opioid mortality: each prevented opioid death was replaced with a heroin death.