Understanding the causal impacts of taking youth on the margins of risk into foster care is an element of the evidence-base on which policy development for this crucial function of government relies. Yet, there is little research looking at these causal impacts; neither is there much empirical...

We provide first-pass evidence that the legalization of the cannabis market across US states may be inducing a crime drop. Exploiting the recent staggered legalization enacted by the adjacent states of Washington (end of 2012) and Oregon (end of 2014) we find, combining county-level...

Can democratically elected politicians persuade their constituents to alter policy priorities? With little empirical support for this hypothesis to date, we propose that Rodrigo Duterte's inauguration speech on June 30, 2016 systematically shifted the Filipinos' policy agenda toward prioritizing...

We investigate the effect of variations in the price of opium in Afghanistan on per capita dispensation of prescription opioids in the US. Quarterly county-level data for 2003-2016 indicate that reductions in opium prices significantly increase the quantity of opioids prescribed. The increase...

The United States federal mandatory minimums have been controversial not only because of the length of the mandatory sentences for even first-time offenders, but also because the eligibility quantities for crack are very small when compared to those for other drugs. This paper shows that the...

This paper provides an empirical test of the rational addiction model, used in economics to model individuals' consumption of addictive substances, versus the utility misprediction model, used in psychology to explain the discrepancy between people's decision and their subsequent experiences. By...

This study is an empirical assessment of the impact of the drug decriminalization policy followed by Portugal in July, 2001. We investigate especially the impact of the policy change on the price of illicit drugs. The analysis is performed using a difference-in-differences approach and a...

In this paper we investigate the dual role of supply restrictions and drug treatment in combating the concurrent rise of opioid abuse and suicide in the United States over the last two decades. We find that supply-side interventions decrease suicides in places with strong addiction-help...

Empirical evidence for the U.S. suggests that illicit consumption of opioids increases in association with socio-economic deprivation of the middle-class. To explore the underlying mechanisms, we set up a task-based labor market model with endogenous mental health status and a health care...

Simple OLS estimates of the effect of school-imposed penalties for drug use on a student's consumption of marijuana are biased if both are determined by unobservable school or individual attributes. The potential reverse causality is also a challenge to retrieving estimates of the causal...