Congratulations to Professor Monica Deza, whose paper “Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs, Opioid Abuse, and Crime” has received the 2021 Georgescu-Roegen Prize from the Southern Economic Association (SEA).
The SEA awards this prize each year for the best academic article published in the Southern Economic Journal.
In this paper, Deza et al. address prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) that have been implemented in response to the United States’ opioid epidemic, and whether or not these policies have affected opioid use and the overprescription of opioids. The authors estimate two-way fixed effects models that control for time invariant characteristics about places and for secular time effects. They match their approach with data on crimes from the Uniform Crime Reports.
Deza et al. find that the most stringent PDMPs with a ‘must access’ requirement reduce crime overall by five percent, with the largest reductions in the domains of assault, burglary, and motor vehicle theft. By contrast, the less restrictive voluntary PDMPs without the must-access requirement have no relationship with crime. The SEA notes that this article is one of the first to link PDMPs with an important downstream social outcome, and that the results have clear relevance to policies related to addressing the opioid epidemic in this country.
The SEA’s press release of the 2021 Georgescu-Roegen Prize can be viewed here.
For more information about the Georgescu-Roegen Prize and previous winners of this award, please click here.