We analyze the doping behavior of heterogeneous athletes in an environment of private information. In a n-player strategic game, modeled as an all-pay auction, each athlete has private information about his actual physical ability and choses the amount of performance-enhancing drugs. The use of...

Background: Bayesian regularization can address over-parameterization of age-period-cohort (APC) mortality models, facilitated by a new methodology for comparing fits of Bayesian regularized models. Here Bayesian Lasso is used to shrink slope changes in linear spline fits of the parameters of...

This paper seeks to understand the treatment effect of Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs) on opioid prescription rates. Using county-level panel data on all opioid prescriptions in the U.S. between 2006 and 2015, we investigate whether state interventions like PDMPs have heterogeneous...

Over the past two decades deaths from opioids and other drugs have grown to be a major U.S. population health problem, but the magnitude of the crisis varies across the U.S., and explanations for widespread geographic variation in the severity of the drug crisis are limited. An emerging debate...

Despite efforts to address the opioid crisis, opioid-related overdoses remain a significant contributor to mortality. State efforts to reduce overdose deaths by removing barriers to naloxone have recently focused on pharmacy channels, but the specifics of these laws and the contexts in which...

The U.S. opioid crisis is now driven by fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid that currently accounts for 90% of all opioid deaths. Fentanyl is smuggled from abroad, with little evidence on how this happens. We show that a substantial amount of fentanyl smuggling occurs via legal trade flows,...

Naloxone is a life-saving medication which helps reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. Improving naloxone access is a central pillar of the federal response to the worsening opioid crisis in the United States. Existing studies have evaluated the effects of state naloxone access laws,...