High School Substance Use and Young Adult Labor Market Outcomes
- Presenter:
Chair: Glenn Blomquist; Discussant: Sandra Decker Tue June 6, 2006 8:00-9:30 Room 325
This paper uses data from the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) to estimate the association between high school alcohol and marijuana use and labor market outcomes in young adulthood. Our empirical strategy is twofold. First, we estimate standard OLS models that incrementally add variables that may confound an observed association between substance use and labor market outcomes. These variables draw on the rich, longitudinal data available in NELS and include personal characteristics, family background, and achievement test scores. Next, we instrument for alcohol use using parental beliefs regarding adolescent substance use (measured when the respondent was in high school) as identifying variables – these factors would be expected to be highly correlated with high school substance use, but not directly related to labor market outcomes of the respondent, after controlling for indirect pathways. Overidentification tests support our identification strategy. Our results offer evidence that marijuana use detracts from adult labor market outcomes but findings for alcohol use are less consistent.
