Recreational marijuana legalization's impact and opioid death rates: A synthetic control approach.

Objectives: To develop a more robust understanding of the relationship between increased recreational marijuana access and opioid overdose deaths. Increasing opioid-related deaths in conjunction with the rising popularity of liberalized marijuana laws make additional research examining the interrelation of both a timely and insightful question.

Study Design: We use synthetic control method to assess the impact of opening recreational marijuana dispensaries via recreational marijuana legalization (RML) on opioid death rates in Colorado, Washington, and Oregon.

Understanding the exceptional pre-vaccination Era East Asian COVID-19 outcomes.

During the first year of the pandemic, East Asian countries have reported fewer infections, hospitalizations, and deaths from COVID-19 disease than most countries in Europe and the Americas. Our goal in this paper is to generate and evaluate hypothesis that may explain this striking fact. We consider five possible explanations: (1) population age structure (younger people tend to have less severe COVID-19 disease upon infection than older people); (2) the early adoption of lockdown strategies to control disease spread; (3) genetic differences between East Asian population and European and American populations that confer protection against COVID-19 disease; (4) seasonal and climactic contributors to COVID-19 spread; and (5) immunological differences between East Asian countries and the rest of the world.

The Federal Reserve's response to the COVID-19 contraction: An initial appraisal.

We provide an initial assessment of the Federal Reserve's policy response to the COVID-19 contraction. We briefly review the historical episode and consider the standard textbook treatment of a pandemic on the macroeconomy. We summarize and then evaluate the Fed's monetary and emergency lending policies through the end of 2020.