Event

This talk describes two approaches used in economics to identify causal effects, and illustrates their use with applications drawn from health economics. The first approach described is the difference in difference estimator. This estimator is used widely in the economics literature that seeks to identify the effects of government policies.   We demonstrated how this framework can be extended to the context of a hazard model and used to investigate the impact of decriminalization on initiation into cannabis.  The second method we present is the mixed proportional hazard model, and it is extended to a bivariate framework to address the issue of simultaneity.  This method is applied to study the relationship between the onset of suicidal ideation and initiation into cannabis use.