Date of Award

Spring 6-14-2025

Document Type

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

Degree Name

B.A. in Economics

Organizational Unit

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Economics

First Advisor

Juan Carlos Lopez

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

All Rights Reserved
All Rights Reserved.

Keywords

Income inequality, Drug mortality, Crude death rate, Gini coefficient, Labor force participation, Nonlinear regression, Rural–urban divide, Deaths of despair, Substance use, County-level analysis, Opioid epidemic, Public health disparities

Abstract

This thesis focuses on investigating the relationship between income inequality, measured through the Gini coefficient, and drug addiction, proxied through substance-related mortality. Specifically, this thesis focuses on how these dynamics vary across rural and urban counties in the United States, using population size as a proxy. County-level data from 2016 to 2020 were collected through both the CDC and the Census Bureau and subsequently analyzed using Stata, with crude death rates from drug and alcohol causes serving as a function of the Gini coefficient, labor force participation, racial composition, and other socioeconomic indicators. Through a quadratic version of the model, a U-shaped relationship between income inequality and drug-related deaths was revealed, suggesting that both extremely equal and highly unequal counties face elevated risk (albeit for different structural reasons). Labor force participation also exhibited a nonlinear but predominantly negative association, with some evidence of an income effect at higher participation levels. Counties with higher populations of white individuals were also a significant predictor of drug mortality, aligning with the literature on “deaths of despair” in America. There were some different patterns between drug crude rates and alcohol crude rates. Ultimately, these findings express that interventions (especially economic ones) must take a nuanced approach to addressing substance abuse at the county level.

Copyright Date

6-2-2025

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Jonathan E. Flores

Provenance

Received from author

File Format

application/pdf

Language

English (eng)

Extent

40 pgs

File Size

336 KB

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