Do Opioids Help Injured Workers Recover and Get Back to Work? The Impact of Opioid Prescriptions on Duration of Temporary Disability

Bogdan Savych, David Neumark and Randall Lea

No 24528, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We estimate the effect of opioid prescriptions on the duration of temporary disability benefits among workers with work-related low back injuries. We use local opioid prescribing patterns to construct an instrumental variable that generates variation in opioid prescriptions but is arguably unrelated to injury severity or other factors directly affecting disability duration. Local prescribing patterns have a strong relationship with whether injured workers receive opioid prescriptions, including longer-term prescriptions. We find that more longer-term opioid prescribing leads to considerably longer duration of temporary disability, but there is little effect of a small number of opioid prescriptions over a short period of time.

JEL-codes: I12 I18 J28 J38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-lma and nep-ltv
Note: EH LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Published as Bogdan Savych & David Neumark & Randall Lea, 2019. "Do Opioids Help Injured Workers Recover and Get Back to Work? The Impact of Opioid Prescriptions on Duration of Temporary Disability," Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, vol 58(4), pages 549-590.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24528.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Do Opioids Help Injured Workers Recover and Get Back to Work? The Impact of Opioid Prescriptions on Duration of Temporary Disability (2019)
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:nbr:nberwo:24528

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24528

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().