Opioids and labor market participation

The onset of the opioid crisis coincided with the beginning of nearly 15 years of declining labor force participation in the US. Furthermore, the areas most affected by the crisis have generally experienced the worst deteriorations in labor market conditions. Despite these time series and cross-sectional correlations, there is little agreement on the causal effect of opioids on labor market outcomes. I provide new evidence on this question by leveraging a natural experiment which sharply decreased the supply of hydrocodone, one of the most commonly prescribed opioids in the US. I identify the causal impact of this decrease by exploiting pre-existing variation in the extent to which different types of opioids were prescribed across geographies to compare areas more and less exposed to the treatment over time. I find that areas with larger reductions in opioid prescribing experienced relative improvements in employment-to-population ratios, driven primarily by an increase in labor force participation. The regression estimates indicate that a 10 percent decrease in hydrocodone prescriptions increased the employment-to-population ratio by about 0.7 percent. These findings suggest that policies which reduce opioid misuse may also have positive spillovers on the labor market.

That is from a job market paper by David Beheshti at the University of Texas at Austin.