Drug control policies improve social welfare by curbing substance abuse or overdose. However, some of their potential unintended consequences, like the effects on drug-related crimes, remain underexplored. For instance, the existing literature has not established any causal relationships between...

Canadian household prescription drug expenditures are studied using different years of the Statistics Canada Family Expenditure Survey. Master files are used, expanding the number of available years and permitting provincial rather than regional identifiers. Nonparametric Engel curves are...

Since the late 1990s, opioids have been increasingly prescribed for pain treatment in the U.S as a result of aggressive marketing by pharmaceutical companies. This has resulted in more than 450,000 opioid overdose deaths since then. In the same time period, several U.S. states have legalized...

The United States is enduring the worst drug overdose crisis in its history. Relative to previous overdose epidemics, the opioid crisis is marked by its severity, breadth, and demographics. Some demographic groups have experienced staggering rates of overdose growth. I examine overdose trends...

Strong empirical evidence points towards a significantly higher prevalence of opioid consumption among people receiving disability benefits (DB) than in the general population of the United States. However, no previous research established a causal relationship between the decision to award DB...

This study investigates the role of retail pharmacy ownership in the opioid epidemic in the United States by comparing independently owned pharmacies' and chain pharmacies' prescription opioid dispensing practices. Using data of prescription opioid orders at the pharmacy level between 2006 and...

To address the opioid crisis, it is crucial to understand its origins. We provide evidence for the intergenerational transmission of opioid dependence. Our analysis is based on administrative data covering the universe of Austrian births from 1984 to 1990. We consider prescription opioids and...

To address the opioid crisis, it is crucial to understand its origins. We provide evidence for the intergenerational transmission of opioid dependence. Our analysis is based on administrative data covering the universe of Austrian births from 1984 to 1990. We consider prescription opioids and...

We model consumer choices for cannabis in a risky environment and determine the supply of cannabis under prohibition and legalization. While introducing a legal market reduces the profits of illegal providers, it increases cannabis consumption. We show that this trade-off can be overcome by...

We examine the early effects of U.S. state Medicaid expansions under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on substance use disorder (SUD) treatment utilization. We couple administrative data on admissions to specialty SUD treatment and prescriptions for medications used to treat SUDs in outpatient...