Opioids and the Labor Market

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.JEL Classifi cation Codes: I10, J22, J28, R12.

Workplace Context to Prevent Substance Misuse in the United States: Associations Between workplace Policies and Employee Substance Use Disorders

“…Thus, the prevention effect of SUWPs could be affected by possible confounding factors, and in particular, geographic regions. Considering the geographic variations in SUD prevalence rates (Aliprantis et al, 2019; Veldhuizen et al, 2007) and the size of industry sectors (Henderson, 2015), future research is needed to identify the impact of these variables on SUWPs and SUDs. Finally, because the employment sectors were grouped into larger categories in the analytical process, inferences about individual professions cannot be made based on the findings of the study.…”