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...

This work introduces two novel methods in measuring income inequality. The first uses publicly available tax summary data to improve estimates of top-coded income in the Current Population Survey. The second is a time-period agnostic and income-level agnostic measure of inequality that relates...

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...

How do the Affordable Care Act health insurance coverage expansions affect payment for medical care provided through liability insurance, such as auto insurance? Theoretically, expanding coverage might lead to a substitution of health insurance disbursements for automobile insurance...

There are two commonly accepted views about command-and-control (CAC) environmental regulation. First, CAC delivers environmental outcomes at very high cost. Second, in a developing country with weak regulatory institutions, CACs may not even yield environmental benefits: regulators can force...

Informality is ubiquitous in the labor markets of developing countries, and requiring that firms formally register, pay taxes, and provide employee benefits stipulated in labor regulations to reduce such informality is challenging. However, a matched survey on employer- employee preferences...

The authors use longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study to examine what factors influence employer accommodation of newly disabled workers and how effective such accommodations are in retaining workers and discouraging disability insurance applications. They find that only a...

Throughout the developing world, many countries have created special economic zones to attract investment and spur industrial growth. In some cases, these zones are designed to promote development in poorer regions with limited market access and lower quality infrastructure, an example of a...

Retirement planning is often a joint household decision-making process, and therefore the household is often the more appropriate unit of analysis. However, retirement savings in tax advantaged accounts are held in the name of one individual. While spouses have rights to these assets in the case...