Substance Abuse during the Pandemic: Implications for Labor-Force Participation / Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner, Karen Kopecky.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Greenwood, Jeremy.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Guner, Nezih.

Kopecky, Karen.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w29932.

NBER working paper series no. w29932

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2022.

Summary:

The labor-force participation rates of prime-age U.S. workers dropped in March 2020--the start of the COVID-19 pandemic--and have still not fully recovered. At the same time, substance-abuse deaths were elevated during the pandemic relative to trend indicating an increase in the number of substance abusers, and abusers of opioids and crystal methamphetamine have lower labor-force participation rates than non-abusers. Could increased substance abuse during the pandemic be a factor contributing to the fall in labor-force participation? Estimates of the number of additional substance abusers during the pandemic presented here suggest that increased substance abuse accounts for between 9 and 26 percent of the decline in prime-age labor-force participation between February 2020 and June 2021.

Notes:

Print version record

April 2022.