Variation in Performance of Commonly Used Statistical Methods for Estimating Effectiveness of State-Level Opioid Policies on Opioid-Related Mortality

Over the last two decades, there has been a surge of opioid-related overdose deaths resulting in a myriad of state policy responses. Researchers have evaluated the effectiveness of such policies using a wide-range of statistical models, each of which requires multiple design choices that can influence the accuracy and precision of the estimated policy effects. This simulation study used real-world data to compare model performance across a range of important statistical constructs to better understand which methods are appropriate for measuring the impacts of state-level opioid policies on opioid-related mortality. Our findings show that many commonly-used methods have very low statistical power to detect a significant policy effect (