TY  - BOOK
AU  - Greenwood,Jeremy
AU  - Guner,Nezih
AU  - Kopecky,Karen
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - Substance Abuse during the Pandemic: Implications for Labor-Force Participation 
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2022///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - April 2022; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - 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
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w29932
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w29932
ER  -