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“High” Innovators? Marijuana Legalization And Regional Innovation, Stephanihe Cheng, Pengkai Lin, Yinliang Tan, Yuchen Zhang
“High” Innovators? Marijuana Legalization And Regional Innovation, Stephanihe Cheng, Pengkai Lin, Yinliang Tan, Yuchen Zhang
Research Collection School Of Accountancy
The past three decades have witnessed a tremendous shift in public health policies towards marijuana legalization in the U.S. Adopting the process-based view of innovation, we hypothesize that marijuana's increased use and related consequences after its legalization affect innovators’ behavior and social environment during the innovation process, which in turn impacts regional innovation. Utilizing the staggered adoption of medical marijuana laws by 20 states between 1996 and 2013 as a quasi-experimental setting, we find that legalizing medical marijuana reduces the overall output of regional innovation, as proxied by patents’ total forward-citation count aggregated by innovator location. Further analyses decomposing the …
Marijuana Liberalization And Public Finance: A Capital Market Perspective On The Passage Of Medical Use Laws, Stephanie F. Cheng, Gus De Franco, Pengkai Lin
Marijuana Liberalization And Public Finance: A Capital Market Perspective On The Passage Of Medical Use Laws, Stephanie F. Cheng, Gus De Franco, Pengkai Lin
Research Collection School Of Accountancy
We find that the staggered passage of state-level laws that legalize marijuana for medical use increases states' borrowing costs by 7–9 basis points. Consistent with economic theory on substance use suggesting that marijuana legalization increases local consumption of the drug (by expanding its availability and reducing its perceived risks), we predict and find that increased consumption represents an important mechanism that explains the higher state bond spreads. We also show that following such laws’ passage, states incur higher marijuana-consumption-related expenditures, including for police, corrections, and public welfare.