Rosalie Liccardo Pacula is a senior economist at the RAND Corporation and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. She serves as director of RAND's BING Center for Health Economics and co-director of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center. Her research at RAND over the last 20 years has largely focused on issues related to illegal or imperfect markets (health care markets, insurance markets, illicit drug markets), measurement of the size of these markets, the impact they have on behavior (suppliers and consumers), and the effectiveness of policy interventions at targeting behavior within these markets. More recently her work has shifted to evaluating the impact of recent opioid policies in the US. She has explored the influence of buprenorphine diffusion, OxyContin reformulation, insurance expansion, medical marijuana and naloxone distribution laws on opioid related harm. She has also done work examining the size of the market for illicit opioids. Pacula has been a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) since 1997, serves on the editorial board of several journals, and is a scientific reviewer for the National Institutes of Health's HSOD committee. She received her Ph.D. in economics from Duke University.
Selected Publications
, "Supply-Side Drug Policy in the Presence of Substitutes: Evidence from the Introduction of Abuse-Deterrent Opioids," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy., 2018 (forthcoming)
, "Do Medical Marijuana Laws Reduce Addictions and Deaths Related to Pain Killers?" Journal of Health Economics, 2018 (forthcoming)
Nicosia N, MacDonald J and RL Pacula, "Does Mandatory Diversion to Drug Treatment Eliminate Racial Disparities in the Incarceration of Drug Offenders?" Journal of Quantiative Criminology, 33(1), 2017
Stein BD, Sorbero M, Dick AW, Pacula RL, Burns RM, and AJ Gordon, "Underutilized physician capacity to treat opioid use disorder with buprenorphine opioid agonist medication assisted treatment," JAMA, 316(11), 2016
Pacula RL, Powell D, Heaton P and E Sevigny, "Assessing the Effects of Medical Marijuana Laws on Marijuana: The Devil is in the Details," Journal of Public Policy Analysis and Management, 34(1), 2015
Caulkins JC, Kilmer B, Kleiman MAR, MacCoun RJ, Midgette G, Oglesby P, Pacula RL and PH Reuter. , Considering Marijuana Legalization Insights for Vermont and Other Jurisdictions, RAND (RR-864), 2015
Hasin DS, Wall M, Keyes KM, Cerda M, Schulenberg J, O’Malley P, Galea S, Pacula RL, and T Feng, "State Medical Marijuana Laws and Adolescent Marijuana Use in the United States:1991-2012," The Lancet-Psychiatry, 2(7), 2015
Galenianos M, Pacula RL and Persico N, "A Search-Theoretic Model of the Retail Market for Illicit Drugs," Review of Economic Studies, 79, 2012
