Sarah Chaney Cambon
speaker
542 appearances
17 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2017
last heard Feb 2023
Sarah Chaney Cambon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Right.
So the general labor force participation rate doesn't have...
sort of that age limitation.
So the labor force participation rate is the share of all workers who either have jobs or are looking for jobs.
Yes.
So basically what we've seen over the past couple of decades is
that both the labor force participation rate and the prime age labor force participation rate have been falling.
And this has been pretty puzzling for economists, especially given kind of where we are in the economic cycle with the expansion kind of humming along.
And this OECD report shows that the labor force participation rate for prime age workers in the US in the fourth quarter
was 80.7%.
And this is really lagging behind other OECD nations that had a combined rate of 85.5%.
And so in the report, there are several different factors that are explored in terms of what's holding down the prime age participation rate.
The opioid crisis is one of those factors.
Basically, they established this
connection between the usage of opioid drugs and labor market conditions.
And by that, I mean that prescription rates for opioids are generally higher where labor force participation rates are lower.
It's important to note, though, that it's really difficult to establish firm causality because some of these areas were doing pretty poorly from a labor market standpoint.
standpoint even before we started having this drop in labor force participation.
So death rates have surged really over the past decade or so as opioids have become really more widely available.
I cite this study by Princeton University economist Alan Kruger.
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