Social welfare returns to legislative capacity: Evidence from the opioid epidemic

By: David Fortunato, Srinivas C Parinandi

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We argue that endowing legislatures with greater resources can improve regulatory com
pliance by allowing representatives to design more specific policy—leaving less discretion
for regulators and less slack for the regulated—and engage in more rigorous ex-post over
sight of regulatory agents. The argument is applied to opioid mortality in the US, a
public health crisis driven in part by regulatory dereliction: the failure of states to limit
irresponsible distribution of opioid pain relievers. We explain the governance roots of
the crisis and predict a negative relationship between overdose mortality and legislative
capacity. Statistical analyses indicate that increasing legislative capacity lowers opioid
mortality, and that the effect is compounding with regulatory work force, suggesting
agents are more effective under strong legislatures. Placebo tests on other “deaths of
despair” resulting from alcohol and suicide, which have similar behavioral or societal
correlates to opioid mortality but should not be influenced by regulatory regimes, are
uncorrelated with legislative capacity, lending credibility to our interpretation.

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