Many medical marijuana patients report using marijuana to alleviate chronic pain from musculoskeletal problems and other sources. If marijuana is used as a substitute for powerful and addictive pain relievers in medical marijuana states, a potential overlooked positive impact of medical...

Drug overdoses involving opioid analgesics have increased dramatically since 1999, representing one of the United States' top public health crises. Opioids have legitimate medical functions, but improving access may increase abuse rates even among those not prescribed the drugs given that...

In 2006, Massachusetts enacted comprehensive health care reform which served as a model for the Affordable Care Act. I study the mortality effects of the reform using synthetic control estimation, relaxing two critical assumptions required to implement this method. The traditional approach...

A vast literature in labor economics has studied the relationship between local labor demand shifts and the outcomes of the working age population. This literature has ignored the impacts that these shocks have on older individuals, though there are reasons to believe that the effects are not...

An emerging literature considers the role of the opioid crisis on labor outcomes, suggesting that increased access to opioids may have led to decreased national labor supply. This paper uses the introduction of OxyContin and geographic variation in its launch to study the labor supply...