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About This Book
Every day young people engage in risky behaviors that affect not only their immediate well-being but their long-term health and safety. These well-honed essays apply diverse economic analyses to a wide range of unsafe activities, including teen drinking and driving, smoking, drug use, unprotected sex, and criminal activity. Economic principles are further applied to mental health and performance issues such as teenage depression, suicide, nutritional disorders, and high school dropout rates. Together, the essays yield notable findings: price and regulatory incentives are critical determinants of high-risk behavior, suggesting that youths do apply some sort of cost/benefit calculation when making decisions; the macroeconomic environment in which those decisions are made matters greatly; and youths who pursue high-risk behaviors are significantly more likely to engage in similar behaviors as adults.This important volume provides both a key data source for public policy makers and a clear affirmation of the usefulness of economic analysis to our understanding of risky behavior.
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Table of contents
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. Risky Behavior among Youths: Some Issues from Behavioral Economics
- 2. Youth Smoking in the United States: Evidence and Implications
- 3. Teens and Traffic Safety
- 4. The Sexual Activity and Birth-Control Use of American Teenagers
- 5. Explaining the Rise in Youth Suicide
- 6. Marijuana and Youth
- 7. The Determinants of Juvenile Crime
- 8. Environment and Persistence in Youthful Drinking Patterns
- 9. Dropout and Enrollment Trends in the Postwar Period: What Went Wrong in the 1970s?
- 10. Youths at Nutrition Risk: Malnourished or Misnourished?
- Contributors
- Author Index
- Subject Index