 An Instrumental Variables Approach to Estimating the Effects of Changes in the Heroin Market on Overdose in the USDaniel Rosenblum, Jay Unick and Daniel Ciccarone No 170011, Working Papers from Canadian Centre for Health Economics Abstract: We investigate a major supply shock to the US heroin market in the 1990s, the introduction of Colombian-sourced heroin, that led to a substantial rise in heroin overdose admissions. The instrumental variables approach uses the interaction of the timing of the supply shock with city-level pre-shock characteristics that have been shown to facilitate or hinder the introduction of new heroin sources. The estimation strategy allows us to disentangle the causal effects of multiple city-level heroin market factors that are correlated with overdose: the price per pure gram of heroin, the coefficient of variation of purity of heroin, and the proportion of heroin of Colombian origin. We find that changes in the price per pure gram and country of origin have substantial effects on heroin overdose admissions. The results have important implications for understanding the effects of changing heroin market conditions on the current US heroin epidemic. Keywords: heroin price; heroin purity; heroin overdose; instrumental variables (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published Online, October 2017 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cch:wpaper:170011 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from Canadian Centre for Health Economics Contact information at EDIRC. |
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