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Home > Weatherhead > JOE > Spring 2024 > Iss. 1 (2024)

 

Abstract

In 2016, Ohio was ranked third in the nation for opioid deaths. The number of opioid-related deaths was over double the national average (Cooper et al. 2020). By 2021, opioids were involved in nearly 75% of overdose deaths (CDC 2023). In 2023, opioid manufacturers and pharmacies were charged with paying Ohio 679.6 million dollars over the next 15 years, as retribution for their involvement in the opioid epidemic (Ohio Attorney General 2023). One of the reasons for this payment is the impact the opioid crisis has had on the labor market. There is much literature on the impact of opioid prescription rates on the labor market, but less research on the impact of opioid deaths (Aliprantis 2019). We utilize the Ohio Integrated Behavioral Health Dashboard to retrieve annual opioid death statistics by county in Ohio for 2019 to 2021, as well as the employment-topopulation ratio by county for 2019 to 2021 from the Ohio Labor Market Information Database. We hypothesize a negative and bidirectional relationship between these variables. We utilize two cross-sectional regressions to model the impact of both directions in all 88 Ohio counties: the effect of the opioid death-to-population ratio on the employment-to-population ratio and the effect of the employment-to-population ratio on the opioid death-to-population ratio. We model this in an attempt to investigate the difference in the magnitude of the relationship in both these directions to uncover which relationship is dominant. We find that a stronger labor market in 2019 (lower employment-to-population ratio) is associated with a lower opioid death-to-population ratio in 2021 at a statistically significant level. We procure a negative but insignificant result in the converse model. Our work contributes to understanding the directionality of the relationships between the opioid epidemic and the labor market.

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