Outside Event: Economics Seminar Series with Carolina Arteaga

Dr. Carolina Arteaga will be presenting as part of the Economics Seminar Series.  Her presentation”Family Formation and Migration: The Legacy of the Opioid Epidemic” is joint work with Victoria Barone and Stephen Claassen.

This paper, examines how the opioid epidemic affected family formation and migration decisions in the United States. Leveraging variation in local exposure to the epidemic—driven by Purdue Pharma’s targeted marketing of OxyContin and proxied by 1996 cancer mortality rates—we find that commuting zones with greater exposure experienced a significant rise in fertility, primarily among unmarried, noncollege-educated women in their late twenties. This increase was accompanied by changes in migration patterns: exposure prompted selective out-migration of

college-educated women, who tend to have lower expected fertility early in life. Our findings suggest that the epidemic altered local population composition and contributed to long-term demographic divergence across commuting zones.

Dr. Arteaga is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Toronto, NBER Faculty Research Fellow and associated faculty at CEMFI. Her research interests are in health, political economy, education and crime.

LOCATION: RAWLS 2058