The Impact of the Opioid Crisis on Firm Value and Investment

Paige Ouimet, Elena Simintzi and Kailei Ye

The Review of Financial Studies, 2025, vol. 38, issue 5, 1291-1332

Abstract: We show a negative effect of opioid prescriptions on subsequent individual employment among employers in our sample using doctor-opioid-prescribing propensity as our instrument. This finding has implications for firms that must now contend with lower local labor supply. We find a negative relationship between opioid prescriptions and subsequent establishment growth. However, firms respond to labor shortages by investing more in technology, replacing the relatively scarcer labor with capital, especially when they are not financially constrained. We find positive abnormal returns, upon the passage of state laws intended to limit opioid prescriptions, that are driven by firms more reliant on labor.

JEL-codes: G31 J21 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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