Suchergebnisse

We provide a brief orientation to the articles that comprise this volume, which is an effort to understand the consequences of the opioid epidemic in a variety of societal and community domains. These domains include child welfare, living arrangements, education, food insecurity, housing, and public budgets, and they are often paid scant attention compared to research that focuses on the direct effects of opioid use. We give an overview of the articles that comprise this volume and discuss the ways in which they contribute new empirical insights on the consequences of the opioid crisis in the U.S. and Canada. We conclude with thoughts on the challenges inherent in this work, insights about how this volume of research might help us understand the broader reach of the epidemic, and how it helps in the development of prosocial public policies.

We use statewide administrative data from Missouri to examine the explanatory power of high schools over student sorting to colleges and majors at 4‐year public universities. We develop a "preparation and persistence index" (PPI) for each university‐by‐major cell in the Missouri system that captures dimensions of selectivity and rigor and allows for a detailed investigation of sorting. Our analysis shows that students' high schools predict the quality of the initial university, as measured by PPI, conditional on their own academic preparation, and that students from lower–socioeconomic status high schools systematically enroll at lower‐PPI universities. However, high schools offer little explanatory power over major placements within universities. (JEL I2, J1)

This article examines the borrowing behavior of students enrolled in for-profit colleges, asking how and why their borrowing differs relative to students pursuing postsecondary education in other sectors. We employ statistical decompositions to understand the extent to which variation in borrowing across sectors can be attributed to observed characteristics of students and of higher education institutions. Drawing on nationally representative data on undergraduate students, we show that college costs of attendance are the primary observed driver of the large differences in borrowing between students in for-profit institutions and those in other sectors. However, a substantial portion of borrowing differences remains unexplained by these high costs, low student financial resources, and variation in college attendance patterns. Further, there is little evidence that changes in these characteristics can explain the rise in student borrowing in the for-profit sector over time. We discuss how these findings present challenges to regulation of the for-profit sector, and the extent to which policymaking can encourage prudent borrowing and college choice decisions.

We propose a simple model of how opioids in a community can impact the educational outcomes of children based on both the extent of exposure to opioids in the community and on the child's vulnerability to any given level of exposure. We then use national data to document where and how the opioid crisis has intersected with students' performance on standardized test scores in the U.S., focusing particularly on rural communities. Finally, we estimate the extent to which variation in one measure of the opioid crisis, drug-related mortality, is related to variation in test scores. We find strong relationships between the two, as well as evidence that the relationship is particularly salient for third-grade students in rural communities.