US Employment and Opioids: Is There a Connection?☆

Janet Currie, Jonas Jin and Molly Schnell

A chapter in Health and Labor Markets, 2019, vol. 47, pp 253-280 from Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Abstract: This chapter uses quarterly county-level data from 2006 to 2014 to examine the direction of causality in the relationship between per capita opioid prescription rates and employment-to-population ratios. We first estimate models of the effect of per capita opioid prescription rates on employment-to-population ratios, instrumenting opioid prescriptions for younger ages using opioid prescriptions to the elderly. We find that the estimated effect of opioids on employment-to-population ratios is positive but small for women, while there is no relationship for men. We then estimate models of the effect of employment-to-population ratios on opioid prescription rates using a shift-share instrument and find ambiguous results. Overall, our findings suggest that there is no simple causal relationship between economic conditions and the abuse of opioids. Therefore, while improving economic conditions in depressed areas is desirable for many reasons, it is unlikely on its own to curb the opioid epidemic.

Keywords: Opioids; employment; unemployment; mortality; labor force participation; deaths of despair; I12; J01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... 7-912120190000047009
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:rleczz:s0147-912120190000047009

DOI: 10.1108/S0147-912120190000047009

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Research in Labor Economics from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().