Over the last two decades there has been considerable movement at the state-level to legalize marijuana, initially for medical purposes and more recently for recreational consumption. Despite prior research, it is unclear how, if at all, these policies are related to rates of opioid-involved...

Accurately determining the number of excess deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is hard. The most important challenge is accurately estimating the counterfactual count of baseline deaths that would have occurred in its absence. This analysis used new methods to: estimate this baseline metric;...

This essay reviews <i>Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism</i> (DEATHS), by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, a fascinating account of life and death in the United States during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. While primarily targeted towards a popular audience, the volume will be of...

We examine gender and race differences in education-mortality trends among 25-64 year olds in the United States from 2001-2018. The data indicate that the relationships are heterogeneous with larger mortality reductions for less educated non-Hispanic blacks than other races and mixed results at...

The dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models that are used to study business cycles typically assume that exogenous disturbances are independent autoregressions of order one. This paper relaxes this tight and arbitrary restriction, by allowing for disturbances that have a rich...

This paper reviews the unconventional U.S. monetary policy responses to the financial and real crises of 2007-09, divided into three groups: interest rate policy, quantitative policy, and credit policy. To interpret interest rate policy, it compares the Federal Reserve's actions with the...

Most countries have automatic rules in their tax-and-transfer systems that are partly intended to stabilize economic fluctuations. This paper measures how effective they are. We put forward a model that merges the standard incomplete-markets model of consumption and inequality with the new...

Increases in "deaths of despair" have been hypothesized to provide an important source of the adverse mortality experiences of some groups at the beginning of the 21st century. This study examines this possibility and uncovers the following primary findings. First, mental health deteriorated...