Alan Krueger on opioids and labor force participation

I haven’t had a chance to look at this one, but here is the headline summary from Brookings:

The new paper, published in the Fall 2017 edition of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, makes a strong case for looking at the opioid epidemic as one driver of declining labor force participation rates.

In fact, Krueger suggests that the increase in opioid prescriptions from 1999 to 2015 could account for about 20 percent of the observed decline in men’s labor force participation during that same period, and 25 percent of the observed decline in women’s labor force participation.

Here is the Brookings link.

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