Abby Alpert (PARC Research Associate) was featured in Penn Today for new research published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics about the origins of the opioid epidemic. Alpert and co-authors examine the role of the 1996 introduction and marketing of OxyContin as a potential leading cause of the opioid crisis by leveraging cross-state variation in exposure to OxyContin's introduction due to a state policy that substantially limited the drug's early entry and marketing in select states.