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Achievement

First draft of "Is Marijuana the Gateway Drug?"

Research Achievements

First draft of "Is Marijuana the Gateway Drug?"

IGERT trainee Monica Deza has completed a first draft of a project titled "Is Marijuana the Gateway Drug?" The study uses a theoretical model calibrated to longitudinal data on youth drug use to separately identify the effects of unobserved inter-personal heterogeneity from real gateway impacts of less serious drugs. The studies methods makes heavy use of dynamic programming (a common tool in economics) to address this particular public health issue. The initial results find a small but positive effect from softer drugs to harder drugs.

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