Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have passed laws that allow individuals to use marijuana for medical purposes. There is an ongoing heated policy debate over whether these laws have increased marijuana use among non-patients. In Chapter 1, I address that question empirically by studying marijuana possession arrests in cities from 1988 to 2008. I estimate fixed effects models with city-specific time trends that can condition on unobserved heterogeneities across cities in both their levels and trends. I find that these laws increase marijuana arrests among adult males by about 15-20%. These results are further validated by findings from data on treatment admissions to rehabilitation facilities: marijuana treatments increased by 10-15% after the passage of medical marijuana laws. Medical marijuana laws generate significant policy debates regarding drug policy. In particular, if marijuana is a complement or a gateway drug to hard drugs, these laws would increase not only the usage of marijuana but hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin. In Chapter 2, I empirically study the relationships between marijuana and cocaine or heroin by analyzing data on drug possession arrests and treatment admissions. I find that medical marijuana laws increase marijuana usage by 10-20%. However, there is no evidence that cocaine and heroin usage increases after the passage of medical marijuana laws. In fact, the estimates on cocaine and heroin arrests or treatments are uniformly negative. From the arrest data, the estimates indicate a 0-20% decrease in possession arrests for cocaine and heroin combined. From the treatment data, the estimates show a 20% decrease in heroin treatments but no significant effect on cocaine treatments. These results suggest that marijuana could be a substitute for heroin.Are work values a cause (Weber) or consequence (Marx) of the economic environment? The collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 provides a unique opportunity to investigate this link. In Chapter 3, using data collected from an employee survey conducted in over 340 workplaces in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia, I and Susan Linz investigate generational differences in adherence to Protestant work ethic (PWE). The results indicate that Marx was "right" about the link between work values and economic environment. That is, despite economic and cultural differences emerging during the transformation process, in all three countries, participating workers born after 1981 adhere more strongly to PWE than workers born before 1977. Moreover, the estimate magnitudes are very similar across these economically and culturally diverse countries.
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