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Author:Burke, Mary A. 

Report
Can Treatment with Medications for Opioid Use Disorder Improve Employment Prospects? Evidence from Rhode Island Medicaid Enrollees

The nation’s long-standing crisis of opioid abuse intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic, with opioid-related deaths rising to nearly 81,000 in 2021, an increase of more than 60 percent from just two years earlier. Also during the pandemic, the labor force participation rate in the United States fell precipitously, and as of September 2022 it remained depressed by more than a full percentage point relative to its February 2020 level despite record numbers of job openings in 2021 and 2022. The unfortunate confluence of labor shortages and record-setting opioid mortality highlights the need ...
New England Public Policy Center Research Report , Paper 22-3

Working Paper
Contracts with social multipliers

We develop a model of contracting in which individual effort choices are subject to social pressure to conform to the average effort level of others in the same risk-sharing group. As in related models of social interactions, a change in exogenous variables or contract terms generates a social multiplier. In this environment, small differences in fundamentals such as skill or effort cost can lead to large differences in group productivity. We characterize the optimal contract for this environment and describe the properties of equilibria, properties that agree with stylized facts on effort ...
Working Papers , Paper 05-17

Working Paper
Who Gets Medication-assisted Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder, and Does It Reduce Overdose Risk? Evidence from the Rhode Island All-payer Claims Database

This paper uses the all-payer claims database (APCD) for Rhode Island to study three questions about the use of medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for opioid use disorder (OUD): (1) Does MAT reduce the risk of opioid overdose; (2) are there systematic differences in the uptake of MAT by observable patient-level characteristics; and (3) how successful were federal policy changes implemented in 2016 that sought to promote increased use of buprenorphine, one of three medication options within MAT? Regarding the first question, we find that MAT as practiced in Rhode Island is associated with a ...
Working Papers , Paper 21-3

Working Paper
Household Inflation Expectations and Consumer Spending: Evidence from Panel Data

Recent research offers mixed results concerning the relationship between inflation expectations and consumption, using qualitative measures of readiness to spend. We revisit this question using survey panel data of actual spending from the U.S. between 2009 and 2012 that also allows us to control for household heterogeneity. We find that durables spending increases with expected inflation only for selected types of households while nondurables spending does not respond to expected inflation. Moreover, spending decreases with expected unemployment. These results imply a limited stimulating ...
Working Papers , Paper 2110

Discussion Paper
Economic literacy and inflation expectations: evidence from a laboratory experiment

We present new experimental evidence on heterogeneity in the formation of inflation expectations and relate the variation to economic literacy and demographics. The experimental design allows us to investigate two channels through which expectations-formation may vary across individuals: (1) the choice of information and (2) the use of given information. Subjects who are more economically literate perform better along both dimensions?they choose more-relevant information and make better use of given information. Compared with survey data on inflation expectations, fewer demographic factors ...
Public Policy Discussion Paper , Paper 11-8

Working Paper
Informal Work and Official Employment Statistics: What’s Missing?

Using eight consecutive waves of the Survey of Informal Work Participation (SIWP) spanning 2015 through 2022, we investigate informal “gig” work participation in the United States— broadly defined to include online and offline activities—and its implications for the measurement of employment. Our results suggest that employment rates among US household heads were consistently understated in the Current Population Survey (CPS). Under conservative estimates, we find that the employment-to-population ratio would have been 0.25 to 1.1 percentage points higher over the 2015–2022 period ...
Working Papers , Paper 23-15

Working Paper
Employment Trajectories among Individuals with Opioid Use Disorder: Can Evidence-Based Treatment Improve Outcomes?

Using administrative records of Medicaid enrollees in Rhode Island that link their health-care information with their payroll employment records, this paper produces new stylized facts concerning the association between opioid use disorder (OUD) and employment and inquires as to whether treatment with FDA-approved medications might boost the job-finding rates of OUD patients. We find that individuals diagnosed with OUD are less likely to be employed compared with other Medicaid enrollees, that their employment tends to be more intermittent, and that they face increased job-separation risk ...
Working Papers , Paper 22-25

Report
Why New England’s Labor Force Participation Has Been Recovering So Slowly since the COVID-19 Pandemic

This report investigates a variety of factors that may explain why New England experienced a participation recovery gap from 2019 through 2023 and discusses the resulting policy implications.
New England Public Policy Center Research Report , Paper 25-1

Working Paper
Race, obesity, and the puzzle of gender specificity

Obesity is significantly more prevalent among non-Hispanic African-American (henceforth ?black?) women than among non-Hispanic white American (henceforth ?white?) women. These differences have persisted without much alteration since the early 1970s, despite substantial increases in the rates of obesity among both groups. Over the same time period, however, we observe little to no significant differences in the prevalence of obesity between black men and white men. Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) and the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System ...
Working Papers , Paper 08-8

Report
Rhode Island in the Great Recession: factors contributing to its sharp downturn and slow recovery

This paper seeks to discover why Rhode Island experienced a more severe downturn during the Great Recession than any other New England state and why it continues to lag other states in the region and the nation as a whole in some measures of labor market health.
Current Policy Perspectives , Paper 14-9

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