There have been more than 500,000 opioid overdose deaths since 2000. To analyze the opioid epidemic, a model is constructed where individuals choose whether to use opioids recreationally, knowing the probabilities of addiction and dying. These odds are functions of recreational opioid usage....

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...

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...

This paper provides the first estimates of the effect of unemployment insurance (UI) on drug overdose deaths. Exploiting both time-series and cross-sectional variation in UI generosity generated by federal and state UI laws, we estimate that a one standard deviation increase in UI generosity...

Misuse of prescription opioids is a leading cause of premature death in the United States. We use new state government administrative data and machine learning methods to examine whether the risk of future opioid dependence, abuse, or poisoning can be predicted in advance of an initial opioid...