Prenatal Exposure to Marijuana and Infant Health in the US

Fernando Fernandez

No 2019-10, Working Papers from Lima School of Economics

Abstract: This study evaluates the consequences of increased marijuana exposure during pregnancy on infant health in the US. Unlike previous studies on the impacts of marijuana, which rely on state-level variation to identify their effects of interest, I exploit county-specific measures of cannabis prenatal exposure using data on the precise location and opening date of every cannabis dispensary (legal point of sale for marijuana) in the country. Estimations based on state-level measures of increased marijuana access suggest no adverse impact on infant health. In addition, the estimated effects exploiting county-level variation in the opening dates of cannabis dispensaries, suggest that higher prenatal exposure to cannabis is unrelated to changes in infant health, once I control for county fixed effects and state-specific trends. Additional evidence from an event-study analysis with similar controls, corroborates that increased availability of marijuana during pregnancy is not linked to changes in infant health.

Keywords: marijuana; cannabis dispensaries; infant health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I12 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.limase.pe/descargas/workingpaper/WP5.pdf Application/pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ima:wpaper:2019-001

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Lima School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Marcos Agurto ().