Full Citation

Title: Opioids and the Labor Market

Citation Type: Working Paper

Publication Year: 2019

ISBN:

ISSN: 2573-7953

DOI: 10.26509/frbc-wp-201807r

NSFID:

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Abstract: This paper studies the relationship between local opioid prescription rates and labor market outcomes. We improve the joint measurement of labor market outcomes and prescription rates in the rural areas where nearly 30 percent of the US population lives. We fi nd that increasing the local prescription rate by 10 percent decreases the prime-age employment rate by 0.50 percentage points for men and 0.17 percentage points for women. This eff ect is larger for white men with less than a BA (0.70 percentage points) and largest for minority men with less than a BA (1.01 percentage points). Geography is an obstacle to giving a causal interpretation to these results, especially since they were estimated in the midst of a large recession and recovery that generated considerable crosssectional variation in local economic performance. We show that our results are not sensitive to most approaches to controlling for places experiencing either contemporaneous labor market shocks or persistently weak labor market conditions. We also present evidence on reverse causality, fi nding that a short-term unemployment shock did not increase the share of people abusing prescription opioids. Our estimates imply that prescription opioids can account for 44 percent of the realized national decrease in men’s labor force participation between 2001 and 2015.

Url: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b16b/8f9b4ab87a384cb0b9c14c5cfc1e7d38dc25.pdf

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Authors: Aliprantis, Dionissi; Fee, Kyle; Schweitzer, Mark E

Series Title: Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Working Paper Series

Publication Number: 1807R

Institution: Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

Pages:

Publisher Location: Cleveland

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Other

Countries: