TY  - BOOK
AU  - Adamopoulou,Effrosyni
AU  - Greenwood,Jeremy
AU  - Guner,Nezih
AU  - Kopecky,Karen
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - The Role of Friends in the Opioid Epidemic
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2024///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
KW  - Instrumental Variables (IV) Estimation
KW  - jelc
KW  - General
KW  - Health Behavior
KW  - Demographic Trends, Macroeconomic Effects, and Forecasts
N1  - January 2024; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - The role of friends in the US opioid epidemic is examined. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (Add Health), adults aged 25-34 and their high school best friends are focused on. An instrumental variable technique is employed to estimate peer effects in opioid misuse. Severe injuries in the previous year are used as an instrument for opioid misuse in order to estimate the causal impact of someone misusing opioids on the probability that their best friends also misuse. The estimated peer effects are significant: Having a best friend with a reported serious injury in the previous year increases the probability of own opioid misuse by around 7 percentage points in a population where 17 percent ever misuses opioids. The effect is driven by individuals without a college degree and those who live in the same county as their best friends
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w32032
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w32032
ER  -