published in: Regional Science and Urban Economics, 2020, 81, 103497
Over the last two decades, the number of delivering mothers using or dependent on opiates has increased dramatically, giving rise to a five-fold increase in the proportion of babies born with neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS). First, the current study documents NAS trends in the United States and their substantial variation across states. Second, it explores the relationship, if any, between the adoption of prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) and reductions in NAS incidence across the United States. We find that the introduction of operational PDMPs reduced NAS incidence in the United States by 10%. We also examined the effects on birth outcomes, infant mortality, and other pregnancy complications and find little evidence of any effect of PDMPs on birth weight, premature births, and infant mortality.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.