Difference-in-Difference (DID) estimators are a valuable method for identifying causal effects in the public health researcher's toolkit. A growing methods literature points out potential problems with DID estimators when treatment is staggered in adoption and varies with time. Despite this, no...

Opioid overdose deaths in older adults have increased substantially over the past two decades. This increase has occurred despite the availability of effective treatments. Methadone, one of just three medications approved by the Food & Drug Administration for opioid use disorder (OUD) treatment,...

A mainstream motivation for decentralized government is to enable public service investments to better align with political preferences that may differ by geographical region. This paper examines how political preferences determine local government provision of hospital services. We find that...

A large literature examines the effect of health insurance on mortality. We contribute by emphasizing two challenges in using the Affordable Care Act (ACA)'s quasi-experimental variation to study mortality. The first is non-parallel pretreatment trends. Rising mortality in Medicaid non-expansion...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) increased demand for healthcare across the U.S., but it is unclear if or how the supply side has responded to meet this demand. In this paper, we take advantage of plausibly exogenous geographical heterogeneity in the ACA to examine the...

Prior work considers effects of prescribing restrictions on opioid use but not upstream implications for pharmaceutical marketing activities, despite the inordinate role many believe marketing played in the crisis. Our study proposes a stylized model of pharmaceutical payments and investigates...

We measure inequities from the COVID-19 pandemic on mortality and hospitalizations in the United States during the early months of the outbreak. We discuss challenges in measuring health outcomes and health inequality, some of which are specific to COVID-19 and others that complicate attribution...

Conventional wisdom often holds that the healthcare sector fares better than other sectors during economic downturns. However, little research has examined the relationship between local economic conditions and healthcare employment. Understanding how the healthcare sector responds to economic...

We studied the effect of marijuana liberalization policies on perinatal health with a multiperiod difference-in-differences estimator that exploited variation in effective dates of medical marijuana laws (MML) and recreational marijuana laws (RML). We found that the proportion of maternal...

When women of childbearing age gain health insurance, we expect their birth outcomes to improve, but comparing births that occur before and after policy changes may confound two separate impacts of coverage. For one, health insurance could affect who gives birth, through reduced costs of...