Who Gets Screened Out? The Opioid Crisis and Employer Skill Requirements

While growing evidence suggests that the opioid crisis has reduced employment levels, little is known about how the crisis has affected job skill requirements—tools that employers use to screen job candidates. Using data on the near universe of US job vacancies, this paper studies the impact of the opioid crisis on employers’ job skill requirements. Specifically, we investigate the effect of the reformulation of OxyContin, which represents one of the most substantial reductions in the availability of abusable prescription opioids. Prior studies have documented that the reformulation resulted in a large transition from prescription opioids to more dangerous illicit opioids. Using a difference-in-differences event study design that exploits firm-level variation in exposure to reformulation, we show that this transition toward illicit opioids has reduced employment at the firm level. Our findings emphasize the distributional consequences of this crisis: less-skilled workers may experience a disproportionate impact from the increased skill requirements, even among workers without a history of opioid use disorders.