Pharmaceutical Promotion and the Opioid Epidemic in the US

Date: January, 23rd - 13h

Room: 23.103 (Mercè Rodoreda Building) - Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

Abstract: Overdose deaths from prescription opioid drugs- such as Oxycodone and Hydrocodonehave quadrupled since 1999 in the US. Drug overdoses have increased so drastically that for certain age groups all-cause mortality rates increased in the last decade, reversing the long-run trend of decreasing mortality rates in previous decades. The amount of prescription opioids sold in the US almost quadrupled since 1999 with no similar increase in the amount of pain experienced by US Americans. We study the impact of pharmaceutical promotion of opioid drugs on opioid overdose death rates in the US. Our findings indicate that counties where more doctors receive promotion for opioid drugs have higher mortality rates of opioid overdoses. We use the distance of the counties to the pharmaceutical companies' headquarters to instrument the likelihood of receiving pharmaceutical promotion. Using MEDICARE Part D prescription data to shed light on the mechanism of increased overdose rates, we show that doctors receiving promotion for opioid drugs have higher opioid prescription rates.

Biography

Fernando Fernández is a PhD student in the Economics department of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. In the past, he worked as a Research Fellow for the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington DC. Before that position, he obtained a master's degree from the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics and a bachelor's degree from the Universidad de Piura in Peru. His research interests include the role of economic incentives in the health sector and, more broadly, the study of economic development. In the past years, he has evaluated the effects of different public interventions on labour market outcomes in developing countries.

Dijana Zejcirovic is a PhD candidate at the Department of Economics and Business at Pompeu Fabra University. Her main areas of research are the Economics of Conflict and Development and Health Economics. In the first part of her thesis she analyses the consequences of civil war on political participation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The second deals with pharmaceutical promotion to physicians in the US and the consequences for the opioid epidemic. She holds her bachelor degree in Economics (2012) from the University of Bonn, Master in Economics (2013) from the Barcelona GSE and Master in Economic Research from Pompeu Fabra University, (2014)."

https://sites.google.com/site/ffernandezbazan/home