Search Results
Discussion Paper
Where There's Smoke...: The Wage Impact of Smoking
Cigarette smokers earn significantly less than nonsmokers, but the magnitude of the smoking wage gap and the pathways by which it originates are unclear. While most research focuses on contemporaneous reasons for the wage differential, the research described in this Policy Hub article finds that decisions made early in life—about education, labor force participation, and occupation—contribute significantly to the wage penalty smokers face later, especially for men. Women are found to be judged more harshly by their current employers for their smoking behavior, and since quitting smoking ...
Journal Article
Did Substance Abuse during the Pandemic Reduce Labor Force Participation?
The labor force participation rates of prime-age US workers dropped in March 2020—the start of the COVID-19 pandemic—and have still not fully recovered. At the same time, deaths from substance abuse were elevated during the pandemic relative to trend, indicating the number of people abusing substances may have increased, and those who abuse opioids and crystal methamphetamine have lower labor force participation rates than those who don’t abuse these substances. Could increased substance abuse during the pandemic be a factor contributing to the fall in labor force participation? ...
Journal Article
Where There's Smoke...: The Wage Impact of Smoking
Cigarette smokers earn significantly less than nonsmokers, but the magnitude of the smoking wage gap and the pathways by which it originates are unclear. While most research focuses on contemporaneous reasons for the wage differential, the research described in this Policy Hub article finds that decisions made early in life—about education, labor force participation, and occupation—contribute significantly to the wage penalty smokers face later, especially for men. Women are found to be judged more harshly by their current employers for their smoking behavior, and since quitting smoking ...
Report
Has COVID Changed Consumer Payment Behavior?
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused large changes in consumer spending, including how people make their payments. We use data from a nationally representative survey of US consumers collected before the pandemic in 2018 and 2019 and in 2020 to analyze changes in consumer payment behavior during the pandemic. We find that compared with their payment behavior in 2019, consumers had shifted some of their purchases from in person to online by fall 2020, significantly lowered their use of cash for purchases, and shifted their person-to-person (P2P) payments away from paper (cash and checks). Those ...
Working Paper
The Dynamics of the Smoking Wage Penalty
Cigarette smokers earn significantly less than nonsmokers, but the magnitude of the smoking wage gap and the pathways by which it originates are unclear. Proposed mechanisms often focus on spot differences in employee productivity or employer preferences, neglecting the dynamic nature of human capital development and addiction. In this paper, we formulate a dynamic model of young workers as they transition from schooling to the labor market, a period in which the lifetime trajectory of wages is being developed. We estimate the model with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, ...
Working Paper
The Downward Spiral
To analyze the opioid epidemic, we construct a model where individuals, with and without pain, choose whether to misuse opioids knowing the probabilities of addiction and dying. These odds are functions of opioid use. Markov chains are estimated from the US data for the college and non–college educated that summarize the transitions into and out of opioid addiction as well as to a deadly overdose. We construct a structural model that matches the estimated Markov chains. We also examine the epidemic’s drivers and the impact of medical interventions.
Report
Access to medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder: is Rhode Island different, and why?
This paper assesses the prevalence of medication-assisted treatment (MAT) among treatment episodes for opioid use disorder (OUD) in Rhode Island, as compared with the remaining New England states and the United States as a whole. Based on the Treatment Episode Data Set (TEDS-A), a national census of admissions into publicly funded treatment facilities for substance use disorders, we find that during the period beginning in 2000 through 2017, Rhode Island exhibited a greater tendency to use MAT as part of OUD treatment compared with the average state in the United States and compared with the ...
Report
Did the Medicaid Expansion Crowd Out Other Payment Sources for Medications for Opioid Use Disorder? Evidence from Rhode Island
Using information from the all-payer claims database for Rhode Island covering more than three-quarters of health insurance enrollees in the state from April 2011 through May 2019, this paper offers new measures of the association between the Medicaid expansion and the rate of receipt of buprenorphine and methadone for opioid use disorder (OUD). These robust measures adjust for the extent to which new Medicaid payments for these medications that started in 2014 crowded out payments from either non-Medicaid insurance or from non-insurance subsidies for the treatment of opioid abuse. We find ...
Report
Can Treatment with Medications for Opioid Use Disorder Improve Employment Prospects? Evidence from Rhode Island Medicaid Enrollees
The nation’s long-standing crisis of opioid abuse intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic, with opioid-related deaths rising to nearly 81,000 in 2021, an increase of more than 60 percent from just two years earlier. Also during the pandemic, the labor force participation rate in the United States fell precipitously, and as of September 2022 it remained depressed by more than a full percentage point relative to its February 2020 level despite record numbers of job openings in 2021 and 2022. The unfortunate confluence of labor shortages and record-setting opioid mortality highlights the need ...
Working Paper
You can be too thin (but not too tall): social desirability bias in self-reports of weight and height
Previous studies of survey data for the United States and other countries find that on average women tend to understate their body weight, while on average both men and women overstate their height. Social norms have been posited as a potential explanation for misreporting of weight and height, but researchers disagree on the validity of that explanation. This paper is the first to present a theoretical model of self-reporting behavior for weight and height that explicitly incorporates social desirability bias. The model generates testable implications that can be contrasted with predictions ...