Working Paper Revision

Opioids and the Labor Market

Abstract: This paper quantifies the relationship between local opioid prescription rates and labor market outcomes in the United States between 2006 and 2016. To understand this relationship at the national level, we assemble a data set that allows us both to include rural areas and to estimate the relationship at a disaggregated level. We control for geographic variation in both short-term and long-term economic conditions. In our preferred specification, a 10 percent higher local prescription rate is associated with a lower prime-age labor force participation rate of 0.53 percentage points for men and 0.10 percentage points for women. We focus on measuring the impact of opioid prescriptions on labor markets, so we evaluate the robustness of our estimates to an alternative causal path, unobserved selection, and an instrumental variable from the literature.

Keywords: Labor Force Participation; Great Recession; Opioid Prescription Rate; Opioid Abuse;

JEL Classification: I10; J22; J28; R12;

https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-wp-201807r3

Bibliographic Information

Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

Part of Series: Working Papers

Publication Date: 2022-07-14

Number: 18-07R3

Note: This paper is the third revision to the paper originally published as WP 18-07 in May of 2018. The first revision was published in March of 2019 and the second in November of 2019.

Related Works

• Working Paper Revision (2022-07-14) : You are here.
• Working Paper Original (2019-11-15) : Opioids and the Labor Market