Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Employment And Drug-Related Mortality, Trung Minh Pham

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In the last two decades, there has been a downturn in labor force participation. One research approach to explain the downturn is death by despair—a recent topic in economics on pain and preventable deaths caused by alcohol, drugs and suicide. This thesis hopes to add to the death by despair literature by exploring the effect of employment on drug-related mortality through empirical investigation across 17 demographic groups—accounting for age, education, gender, and race—from 2011 to 2018, and covering all 50 US states along with the District of Columbia. Different estimations of population (demographic groups, gender and state total) are used …