Opioids and the Labor Market

Dionissi Aliprantis, Kyle Fee and Mark Schweitzer

No 18-07R, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

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 find 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 effect 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 cross-sectional 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, finding 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

Keywords: Labor Force Participation; Opioid Abuse; Great Recession; Opioid Prescription Rate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 J22 J28 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2019-03-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma and nep-ure
Note: Revision of Working Paper 1807, first published in May 2018.
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-wp-201807r Full text (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Opioids and the labor market (2023)
Working Paper: Opioids and the Labor Market (2022)
Working Paper: Opioids and the Labor Market (2018)
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:fip:fedcwq:180701

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

DOI: 10.26509/frbc-wp-201807r

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by 4D Library ().