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In May 2018, Scotland introduced a minimum unit price on alcohol. We examine the impact of this policy on traffic fatalities and drunk driving accidents. Using administrative data on the universe of vehicle collisions in Britain and a range of quasi-experimental modeling approaches, we do not find that the policy had an effect on road crash deaths and drunk driving collisions. The results are robust to several sensitivity exercises. There is no evidence of effect heterogeneity by income and other predictors of alcohol consumption or cross-border effects. A brief discussion of the policy implications of our findings is provided.

We provide evidence of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on racial hate crime in England and Wales. Using various data sources, including unique data collected through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests from UK police forces, a difference-in-difference and event study approaches, we find that racial hate crime against East Asians increased by 70-100%, beginning in early February and persisted until November 2020. This increase was greatest in the weeks leading up to the first national lockdown in the UK. The shock was then lower during lockdown, before increasing again in the summer 2020. We present evidence that hate crime increased as COVID-19 cases in China increased and following announcements from the government signalling that China or Chinese individuals posed a public health risk to the UK. This indicates that protectionism played an important role in the observed hate crime spike. The hate crime shock was also positively correlated with the salience of the national lockdown and government policies restricting certain freedoms. The effect was driven largely by changes in London. This suggests that retaliation for lockdown contributed to the rise in hate crime.

Reducing drink drive limits is generally regarded an effective strategy to save lives on the road. Using several new administrative data sources, we evaluate the effect of a stricter limit introduced in Scotland in 2014. This reduction had no effect on drink driving and road collisions. Estimates from a supply-of-offenses function suggests that the reform did not have much ex-ante scope for sizeable effects. The unavailability of cheaper alternative means of transportation and weak law enforcement seem to have been the main channels behind the lack of an impact. We find no externality on a wide range of domains, from alcohol consumption to criminal activities other than drink driving.

In this paper we examine the impact of a tailored health warning on health outcomes. We exploit the design of a household panel survey that provided feedback to participants on their blood-pressure levels as a quasi-experiment. We find that many participants who were told their blood-pressure was high went on to get a formal diagnosis of hypertension from a medical practitioner. The effect of getting a formal hypertension diagnosis was to reduce the incidence of smoking and improve the quality of diets. However, we do not find changes in monthly alcohol spending. The behavioural changes (plus any prescribed medications) were large enough to reduce the incidence of cardiovascular disease.

We provide causal evidence of the impact of the Brexit referendum vote on hate crime in the United Kingdom (UK). Using various data sources, including unique data collected from the UK Police Forces by Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, and various estimation methods (difference-in-differences, event-study analysis and synthetic control methods), we find that the Brexit referendum led to an increase in hate crime by around 15-25%. This effect was concentrated in the first quarter after the referendum and was larger in areas that voted to leave the European Union (EU). We also provide evidence against the hypotheses that this was due to victims' greater willingness to report crimes or due to changes in police behaviour and perceptions of the victims. We also present suggestive evidence that the media and social media played a small but significant role in the increase in hate crime.

We investigate whether short-term everyday stressors leads to unhealthier dietary choices among low socioeconomic status mothers. We propose a novel stress protocol that aims to mimic everyday stressors experienced by this population, involving time and financial pressure. We evaluate the impact of stress on immediate and planned food choices, comparing a group exposed to our stress protocol relative to a control group. Immediate consumption is measured with in-laboratory consumption of low calorie and high calorie snacks; planned consumption is measured with an incentivized food shopping task. The stressfulness of the stress protocol is evaluated using subjective assessments, as well as physiological measurements (heart rate and salivary cortisol levels). We find no evidence of an effect of stress on the nutritional content of immediate or planned food consumption, thus no support for the hypothesis that everyday stressors are a likely explanation for unhealthy food choices.

This paper tests an intervention aimed at facilitating (cognitively) the adoption of healthy dietary habits. We provide easy-to-understand information about the risks of developing diabetes or heart diseases and give easy-to-follow dietary recommendations to minimize these risks. We implement two variations, one consisting of generic information, the other consisting of information tailored to the individual, the latter resembling newly developed on-line health assessment tools. On top of the information treatment, we implement a second experimental variation nudging people into spending more time thinking about their dietary choices. We find evidence that the information intervention leads to healthier choices in the short run, but mostly in the generic treatment. Surprisingly, we find that people are on average pessimistic about their health, and therefore receive good news on average when the information is tailored to them. We find no evidence that increasing the time available to make choices leads to healthier choices, and find no evidence of long-term changes in habits. These results do not support a bounded rationality explanation for poor dietary choices.

We estimate the effect of binge drinking on accident and emergency attendances, road accidents, arrests, and the number of police officers on duty using a variety of unique data from Britain and a two-sample minimum distance estimation procedure. Our estimates, which reveal sizeable effects of bingeing on all outcomes, are then used to monetize the short-term externalities of binge drinking. We find that these externalities are on average £4.9 billion per year ($7 billion), about £80 for each man, woman, and child living in the UK. The price that internalizes this externality is equivalent to an additional 9p per alcoholic unit, implying a 20% increase with respect to the current average price.

We conduct a field experiment in 31 primary schools in England to test the effectiveness of different temporary incentive schemes, an individual based incentive scheme and a competitive scheme, on increasing the choice and consumption of fruit and vegetables at lunchtime. The individual scheme has a weak positive effect whereas all pupils respond to positively to the competitive scheme. For our sample of interest, the competitive scheme increases choice of fruit and vegetables by 33% and consumption of fruit and vegetables by 48%, twice and three times as much as the individual incentive scheme, respectively. The positive effects generally carry over to the week immediately following the treatment but we find little evidence of any effects six months later. Our results show that incentives can work, at least temporarily, to increase healthy eating but there are large differences in effectiveness between schemes and across demographics such as age and gender.

This paper uses the Jamie Oliver Feed Me Better campaign to evaluate the impact of healthy school meals on educational outcomes. The campaign introduced drastic changes in the meals offered in the schools of one Borough, shifting from low-budget processed meals towards healthier options. We evaluate the effect of the campaign on educational outcomes using a difference in differences approach; comparing key stage 2 outcomes in primary schools before and after the reform, using the neighbouring Local Education Authorities as a control group. We find evidence that healthy school meals did improve educational outcomes, in particular in English and Science.