Current Research
The Effect of Medical Cannabis Dispensaries on Opioid and Heroin Overdose Mortality
(Joint with Vincent Pohl, and Rhet Smith) : Opioid overdose is the most common cause of accidental death in the United States and no policy response has been able to contain this epidemic to date. We examine whether local access to medical cannabis can reduce opioid-related mortality. Using a unique data set of medical cannabis dispensaries combined with county-level mortality data, we estimate the effect of dispensaries operating in a county on the number of overdose deaths. We find that counties with dispensaries experience 6% to 8% fewer opioid-related deaths among non-Hispanic white men. Mortality involving heroin declines by approximately 10% following the opening of a dispensary.
Resting Papers
Residential Mortgage and Nonrecourse Debt: Default Decision in a Dynamic Framework (New version coming soon): I develop a life-cycle model to study the effects of nonrecourse mortgages on the default decision of homeowners. In the model, the tenure decision is endogenously determined and, every period, householders decide whether to default on their mortgage in the presence of uncertainty in both income and house prices. By incorporating a riskless asset, I study the extent to which the recourse allowed to lenders can affect default rates. I find that while the size of the down payment has a noticeable impact in the default decision of homeowners in a recourse environment, the punishment that follows default does not.