Browsing by Author "Lozano-Rojas, Felipe"

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    Effects of social distancing policy on labor market outcomes
    (Wiley, 2023) Gupta, Sumedha; Montenovo, Laura; Nguyen, Thuy; Lozano-Rojas, Felipe; Schmutte, Ian; Simon, Kosali; Weinberg, Bruce A.; Wing, Coady; Economics, School of Liberal Arts
    US workers receive unemployment benefits if they lose their job, but not for reduced working hours. In alignment with the benefits incentives, we find that the labor market responded to COVID-19 and related closure-policies mostly on the extensive (12 pp outright job loss) margin. Exploiting timing variation in state closure-policies, difference-in-differences (DiD) estimates show, between March 12 and April 12, 2020, employment rate fell by 1.7 pp for every 10 extra days of state stay-at-home orders (SAH), with little effect on hours worked/earnings among those employed. Forty percentage of the unemployment was due to a nationwide shock, rest due to social-distancing policies, particularly among "non-essential" workers.
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    The Effect of Cannabis Laws on Access to Pain Medications among Commercially Insured Patients in the United States
    (Elsevier, 2022-12-11) Lozano-Rojas, Felipe; Abraham, Amanda; Gupta, Sumedha; Bradford, David; School of Public and Environmental Affairs
    Chronic pain is a major trigger for opioid prescribing in the U.S. Further, 35 U.S. states and the District of Columbia have adopted medical cannabis laws (MCLs), and chronic pain is the most common condition qualifying for medical cannabis access. Little is known about how legal access to medical cannabis has changed prescribing patterns for commercially insured Americans. In this article, we estimate a series of state-by-state synthetic control case-studies (29 cases, across 22 states in two policy levers for which observable pre-and post- policy timeframe comply with our eligibility criteria), using data from a nationwide comprehensive commercial claims database with approximately 15 – 20 million patients per year. We assess changes in patterns of opioid analgesic and non-opioid pain medications dispensed, capturing both intensive and extensive margins. The methodology allows us to construct a stable counterfactual in the pre-policy period for each case and to accommodate heterogeneity across treated units and their treatment timing. In all except two of the 22 examined states we find reductions in the rate of patients receiving any dispensed prescriptions of opioids (extensive margin) following the implementation of an MCL, the majority of which are statistically significant at conventional levels. We also find a marginally significant reduction in the intensive margin, measured as both the average daily supply of dispensed prescriptions and as the average number of dispensed prescriptions per patient. When we focus on other non-opioid pain medications, we do not find such a clear pattern, with very few significant effects emerging following the introduction of MCLs. Our study highlights the large variation in positive spillovers of MCLs on prescription opioid utilization among commercially insured Americans across U.S. states. Findings suggest that cannabis may offer an alternative for pain management with opioid analgesics. Thus, policymakers should consider MCLs as an alternative tool for pain management, specifically when other policies that constrain supply of opioids might push some Americans to more harmful substances.
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    Tracking Public and Private Responses to the Covid-19 Epidemic: Evidence from State and Local Government Actions
    (University of Chicago Press, 2021) Gupta, Sumedha; Nguyen, Thuy Dieu; Lozano-Rojas, Felipe; Raman, Shyam; Lee, Byungkyu; Bento, Ana; Simon, Kosali Ilayperuma; Wing, Coady; Economics, School of Liberal Arts
    This paper examines the determinants of social distancing during the shutdown phase of the COVID-19 epidemic. We classify state and local government actions, and we study multiple proxies for social distancing based on data from smart devices. Mobility fell substantially in all states, even ones that did not adopt major distancing mandates. Most of the fall in mobility occurred prior to the most stringent sanctions against movement, such as stay-at-home laws. However, we find evidence suggesting that state and local policies did have an independent effect on mobility even after the large initial reductions occurred. Event studies show that early and information-focused actions such as first case announcements, emergency declarations, and school closures reduced mobility by 1–5 percent after five days. Between March 1 and April 14, average time spent at home grew from 9.1 hours to 13.9 hours. We find, for example, that without state emergency declarations, hours at home would have been 11.3 hours in April, suggesting that 55 percent of the growth is associated with policy and 45 percent is associated with (non-policy) trends. State and local government actions induced changes in mobility on top of a large and private response across all states to the prevailing knowledge of public health risks.