In this talk, I will discuss the findings of three recent papers on the U.S. opioid epidemic. The first paper, "U.S. Employment and Opioids: Is There a Connection?" (Currie, Jin, Schnell, 2018), examines how economic conditions have contributed to the crisis and how opioid use across the United States has in turn affected economic outcomes. The second paper, "Addressing the Opioid Epidemic: Is There a Role for Physician Education?" (Schnell and Currie, 2018), turns to the role played by medical providers and asks whether large differences in prescribing volumes observed across physicians can be explained in part by differences in education. Finally, the third paper, "Physician Behavior in the Presence of a Secondary Market: The Case of Prescription Opioids" (Schnell, 2019), examines how the presence of an illegal, secondary market for prescription opioids influences the prescribing practices of physicians and demonstrates how interactions between legal and illegal markets complicate policies to address the epidemic. All three papers highlight the difficulties that policy makers, public health workers, and the medical community face in designing policies to limit the supply of opioids available for misuse while maintaining access to compassionate care.

Date: Monday, February 11, 2019

Time: 3:30pm – 5:00pm

Location: Segal Graduate School of Business

500 Granville Street, Vancouver, BC

Room 2800 (2^nd floor)

Cost: Complimentary, RSVP required.

Inquiries: beedie-events@sfu.ca

Register here

Molly Schnell is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and will be joining Northwestern University as an assistant professor of economics in July 2019. Much of her research examines the provision of pharmaceuticals in markets across the U.S. with a particular focus on markets for opioid analgesics. Schnell received her Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 2018.