To analyze the opioid epidemic, we construct a model where individuals, with and without pain, choose whether to misuse opioids knowing the probabilities of addiction and dying. These odds are functions of opioid use. Markov chains are estimated from the US data for the college and non–college...

Background: This paper contributes to the evidence-base on prices and alcohol use by presenting meta-analytic summaries of price and income elasticities for alcohol beverages. The analysis improves on previous meta-analyses by correcting for outliers and publication bias.Methods: Adjusting for...

We investigate the relationship between household debt and health outcomes for OECD countries over the period 1995 to 2012. Using a dataset of aggregated, standardized and objective measures of household debt and health outcomes, we estimate an instrumental variable (GMM) model in order to deal...

After the 2007-08 food crisis, addressing high and volatile cereal prices became a priority for national governments in Sub-Saharan Africa because of their key role in determining consumption and income of poor smallholders. Nevertheless, the lack of information and some misperceptions on the...

This paper presents empirical evidence on the relationship between alcohol consumption and unemployment for an international panel of countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). I find a significant negative or pro-cyclical relationship between unemployment and...

By scraping data of almost 17 trillion plays of songs on Spotify in six European countries, this work provides evidence that the lockdown imposed in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic significantly changed the music consumption in terms of nostalgia. This work constructs a binary measure of...

Currently developed countries pay much more attention to harmfully addictive substances than developing countries. However, the experience of developed countries is very relevant to the developing world since substance abuse is likely to impose a continually increasing burden of disease in this...