Philip Cook

Significance In the United States, 13% of households depend on an unregulated private well for their water. Compared with children in houses served by a regulated water utility, children in these homes have a 25% increased risk of elevated blood lead. Because lead is a neurotoxin, these children are at greater risk of experiencing irreversible cognitive damage, which can decrease their performance in school and increase their risks of behavioral problems. This study assesses associations between children’s blood lead and dependence on an unregulated private well for drinking water. It highlights the need for interventions to control lead corrosion from plumbing and well components (such as drop pipes, pump parts, and valves and fittings) in households depending on private wells.

Introduction 1. America and Its Guns 2. Reasons for Owning a Firearm 3. The Value of Guns for Safety and Protection 4. The Costs of Gun Violence 5. Causes of Gun Violence 6. Manufacture and Marketing of Guns 7. How America Regulates Firearms 8. Effectiveness of Firearms Policy 9. Guns and Gun Control in History 10. Public Opinion and Political Party Positions on Guns 11. The Gun Rights Movement 12. The Gun Control Movement 13. Gun Policy Going Forward Bibliography Index

How Large Is the Gun Industry in America? The gun industry itself is rather small by traditional measures. Only a handful of companies produce a significant number of firearms in the United States, and at most 150,000 people are employed in the industry—about 1...

How Many Americans Are Killed or Injured by Gunfire? Approximately 1 million Americans have died from gunshot wounds in homicides, accidents, and suicides during just the last three decades—more than all combat deaths in all wars in US history. In 2017, the National Center...

What Is the Gun Violence Prevention Movement? Like the gun rights movement, the gun violence prevention movement includes national, state, and local organizations. Some are single-issue organizations, spending all their time on gun violence prevention, while others are multi-issue allies from the women’s, religious,...

With So Many Guns Out There, Is There Any Point to Gun Control? Yes. The evidence suggests that certain regulations have been effective in reducing gun use in crime. And even in the United States, guns are not as readily available as some commentators...

This paper examines causal sibling spillover effects among socially advantaged (e.g. white, two-parent, or non-poor school district) and disadvantaged families (e.g. black, single-mother, or poor school district) in elementary and middle school. Exploiting discontinuities in school starting age created by North Carolina school entry laws, we adopt a quasi-experimental approach and compare test scores of public school students whose older siblings were born shortly before and after the school entry cutoff date. We find that individuals whose older siblings were born shortly after the school entry cutoff date have significantly higher scores in middle school, and that this positive spillover effect is particularly large among disadvantaged families. We estimate that these spillover effects account for more than one third of observed statistical associations in test scores between siblings, and the magnitude is much larger for disadvantaged families than advantaged families. Our results suggest that educational spillover effects from older to younger siblings lead to greater divergence in academic outcomes between families.

The Organs and Inducements symposium originated from two developments: (1) the large and growing gap between kidney supply and need for people with end-stage renal disease and (2) the failure of recent policy and medical innovations to reverse that trend. The gap between kidney need and supply became visible after the United Network for Organ Sharing data system first went online in 1995 and has been growing ever since. (1) Over the next decade through 2006, transplants increased but the number of patients in need of kidneys grew faster than the supply of kidneys available for transplantation. Since 2006 the need for kidneys has continued to increase, albeit slowly, but the number of suitable kidneys available for transplantation has plateaued, resulting in a still-further widening of the gap. (2) Today, over 7500 patients with end-stage renal disease die each year while awaiting a transplant or become too sick to transplant, while many more languish on the kidney waiting list, which passed 100,000 persons for the first time this year. (3) Although recent advances in kidney transplantation, such as kidney paired donation and nonsimultaneous, extended, altruistic donor (NEAD) chains hold great promise, the number of transplants performed using such techniques remains small and has failed to stem the trend of unmet need. (4) Most of those on the waiting list are on dialysis, a costly and time-consuming procedure that is far less satisfactory than transplantation in sustaining either the quality or duration of life for renal patients. (5) From one perspective, this great loss of life is tragic in that it is foreseeable but unnecessary. Recent evidence suggests that if kidney donors were offered a reasonable payment, enough of them could be recruited to close the current gap, thereby saving thousands of lives and reducing the overall public expenditures on renal disease. (6) From another perspective, paying someone to donate a body part is immoral per se, even if the medical consequences to the donor are minimal and the choice to donate is deliberate and carefully administered. This latter view is incorporated in current law in the United States and all but a handful of other nations in the world. (7) We convened an interdisciplinary discussion at Duke University in the spring of 2013 to discuss these issues, with a particular focus on potential next steps in the long-running debate about methods to increase the supply of transplantable organs. We purposely employed the term "inducements" rather than "incentives," believing that the term "incentives" had become too closely tied with organ markets in the traditional sense--compensation for organs with money, vouchers, or some close cousin. In contrast, we viewed the phrase "inducement" as potentially signifying something broader and more inclusive. According to Merriam-Webster, an inducement is simply "a motive or consideration that leads one to action." (8) We thus invited discussion and investigation, not only of proposals to increase organ supply that involved offering donors monetary or similar compensation, but also more subtle means to facilitate and encourage organ donation. From our perspective, then, inducements could range from public-awareness campaigns exhorting people to donate and informing them of the severity of the organ shortage at one end of the spectrum to outright organ-auction markets at the other end of the spectrum. But we largely expected authors to address the many interesting variations on potential inducement schemes in between those two extremes, and that is what our participants did. The Kidney Transplantation Primer by Philip J. Cook and Kimberly D. Krawiec sets the stage for the discussion by quantitatively documenting the growing gap between kidney need and supply. Cook and Krawiec demonstrate that the current system provides only about half as many kidneys as are needed for transplantation. …

Every question about guns, gun violence, or gun policy is contentious. Basic facts—the annual number of gun transactions, or even the number of guns in private hands—are not known with any precision. Estimates of the costs and consequences of our nation’s gun laws are...

Why Is Self-Defense Central to the Debate over Gun Control? Personal safety is a vital matter, and self-protection is a more compelling rationale for owning guns than recreation. We can all conjure up the nightmare scenario of being defenseless in a violent confrontation with...

What Is the Gun Rights Movement? The gun rights movement consists of several hundred local, state, and national organizations that seek to promote a positive view of firearms in public life and to prevent and remove restrictions on gun ownership and use. Generally speaking,...

No topic is more polarizing than guns and gun control. From a gun culture that took root early in American history to the mass shootings that repeatedly bring the public discussion of gun control to a fever pitch, the topic has preoccupied citizens, public officials, and special interest groups for decades. In this thoroughly revised second edition of The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know® noted economist Philip J. Cook and political scientist Kristin A. Goss delve into the issues that Americans debate when they talk about guns. With a balanced and broad-ranging approach, the authors thoroughly cover the latest research, data, and developments on gun ownership, gun violence, the firearms industry, and the regulation of firearms. The authors also tackle sensitive issues such as the impact of gun violence on quality of life, the influence of exposure to gun violence on mental health, home production of guns, arming teachers, the effect of concealed weapons on crime rates, and the ability of authorities to disarm people who aren’t allowed to have a gun. No discussion of guns in the U.S. would be complete without consideration of the history, culture, and politics that drive the passion behind the debate. Cook and Goss deftly explore the origins of the American gun culture and the makeup of both the gun rights and gun control movements. Written in question-and-answer format, this updated edition brings the debate up-to-date for the current political climate under Trump and will help readers make sense of the ideologically driven statistics and slogans that characterize our national conversation on firearms. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in getting a clear view of the issues surrounding guns and gun policy in America.

Dropouts have high crime rates, but is there a direct causal link? This study, utilizing administrative data for six cohorts of public school children in North Carolina, demonstrates that those born just after the cut date for enrolling in public kindergarten are more likely to drop out of high school before graduation and to commit a felony offense by age 19. We present suggestive evidence that dropout mediates criminal involvement. Paradoxically, these late-entry students outperform their grade peers academically while still in school, which helps account for the fact that they are less likely to become juvenile delinquents. (JEL H75, I21, J13, J24, K42)

Improving academic outcomes for economically disadvantaged students has proven challenging, particularly for children at older ages. We present two large-scale randomized controlled trials of a high-dosage tutoring program delivered to secondary school students in Chicago. One innovation is to use paraprofessional tutors to hold down cost, thereby increasing scalability. Participating in math tutoring increases math test scores by 0.18 to 0.40 standard deviations, and increases math and nonmath course grades. These effects persist into future years. The data are consistent with increased personalization of instruction as a mechanism. The benefit-cost ratio is comparable to many successful early childhood programs. (JEL H75, I21, I24, I26, I32, J13, J15)

Is There a Uniquely American Gun Culture? Yes. We know of no other country where firearms are as plentiful and as inextricably linked to individual identity and popular values as they are in the United States. Citizens of other nations possess and use guns,...

Do Americans Want Stricter Gun Laws? Public opinion experts have long observed that the United States has a gun control paradox: Most Americans favor all sorts of firearms regulations—sometimes overwhelmingly so—yet these regulations are not enacted into law. Four decades ago, one scholar noted...

Ethicists who oppose compensating kidney donors claim they do so because kidney donation is risky for the donor’s health, donors may not appreciate the risks and may be cognitively biased in other ways, and donors may come from disadvantaged groups and thus could be exploited. However, few ethical qualms are raised about professional football players, who face much greater health risks than kidney donors, have much less counseling and screening concerning that risk, and who often come from racial and economic groups deemed disadvantaged. It thus seems that either ethicists—and the law—should ban both professional football and compensated organ donation, allow both, or allow compensated organ donation but prohibit professional football. The fact that we choose none of those options raises questions about the wisdom of the compensation ban.

What Are the Basics of the US System of Gun Regulation? Gun regulations have a long history, stretching back to the colonial era. By and large, the laws have been enacted to secure the common defense, to protect individuals from harm, to assist law-enforcement...

Prior research and anecdotal evidence from educators suggest that classroom peers play a meaningful role in how students learn. However, the literature has failed to consider the dynamic and context-dependent nature of classroom peer influence. Developmental psychology theories suggest that peer influence will increase and family influence will decrease as children enter adolescence. This study uses rich administrative data from North Carolina in 2006 to 2012, matching students to all peers in each of their courses in third through eighth grades. The analysis identifies trends in the magnitude of classroom peer effects across grade levels, with special attention to controlling for confounding factors such as simultaneous influence, student–classroom sorting, nonlinearity, and school-type effects. Consistent with psychological theories about adolescence, our findings indicate that the effect of average peer quality multiplies by a factor of nearly 3 for reading and 5 for math between...

JEL No. I12 Regression results from a 30-year panel of the state-level data indicate that changes in alcohol-excise taxes cause a reduction in drinking and lower all-cause mortality in the short run. But those results do not fully capture the long-term mortality effects of a permanent change in drinking levels. In particular, since moderate drinking has a protective effect against heart disease in middle age, it is possible that a reduction in per capita drinking will result in some people drinking "too little " and dying sooner than they otherwise would. To explore that possibility, we simulate the effect of a one percent reduction in drinking on all-cause mortality for the age group 35-69, using several alternative assumptions about how the reduction is distributed across this population. We find that the long-term mortality effect of a one percent reduction in drinking is essentially nil.

During the early 1990s, Americans reported to pollsters that crime was far and away the number one problem facing the country.1 The remarkable drop in crime that we have experienced since then has substantially improved our standard of living. It has allowed residents to reclaim public spaces, helped

as well as the staffs of the Chicago Public School system, Match Education and Youth Guidance. Thanks to Marianne Bertrand and Ofer Malamud for helpful comments. Thanks to Stacy Norris for her help in accessing the data we analyze here, to Amanda Norton and Matthew Smith for all of their valuable assistance, to Richard Harris for his incredible efforts analyzing the data, and especially to Nathan Hess for his amazing leadership of the data analysis reported here. Points of view or opinions in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the US Department of Justice. Any errors are of course our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors 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 peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official

In a variety of important domains, there is considerable correlational evidence suggestive of what are variously referred to as social norm effects, contagion effects, information cascades, or peer effects. It is difficult to statistically identify whether such effects are causal, and there are various non-causal mechanisms that can produce such apparent norm effects. Lab experiments demonstrate that real peer effects occur, but also that apparent cascade or peer effects can be spurious. A curious feature of American local school configuration policy provides an opportunity to identify true peer influences among adolescents. Some school districts send 6th graders to middle school (e.g., 6th-8th grade “junior high”); others retain 6th graders for one additional year in K-6 elementary schools. Using administrative data on public school students in North Carolina, we have found that sixth grade students attending middle schools are much more likely to be cited for discipline problems t...