Study: Boozers Aren’t Losers In Earnings

Teenagers who binge-drink during high school may have a harder time finding a job compared to their non-binge drinking counterparts, but when they do land a job, their earning potential averages 6 percent higher, according to researchers in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research last month.

The study was conducted by Pinka Chatterji, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a health economist at the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research, and Jeffrey S. DeSimone, an assistant professor of economics at the University of South Florida.

In the paper, Chatterji and DeSimone conjectured that part of the reason binge-drinkers had higher wages was that most binge drinkers “on average have better interpersonal skills than tenth graders who do not binge drink.”

In other words, heavy drinkers are more likely to be socially adept and to possess the communicative skills that employers desire, according to Chatterji.

However, the relationship between binge-drinking and wages is not necessarily direct.“It doesn’t make sense to think about it as a causal relationship,” warned Chatterji. “The data suggests that there are unobserved factors associated with drinking and wages that are hard to measure.”

Dean of the Social Sciences David Cutler '87. an economist, agreed. “I doubt it’s causal; it could be a selection issue. Students who binge drink in college could be more popular; popularity carries over to the labor market,” Cutler said.

Unexpectedly, the data showed that the wage premium only applied to males; no correlation between binge-drinking and wages was found for females.

Chatterji and DeSimone analyzed data collected by the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), which tracked and periodically interviewed approximately 12,000 students starting in 1988, when the students were in eighth grade. The NELS continued to follow them for 12 years, until the year 2000, when most participants in the study were 26 years old.

Chatterji and DeSimone drew on the interviews conducted in 1988, 1990, and 2000, when the respondents were eighth-graders, tenth-graders, and 26 year-old adults, respectively.

Surveyors defined binge drinking as consecutively drinking five or more drinks in one night for a man, four or more for a woman.

The study accounted for such potential confounding factors as academic achievement, background characteristics, educational attainment, adult drinking habits, and family and job characteristics.

The correlation between drinking and wage premiums only applied to binge drinkers—there is no correlation between the wages and drinking habits of moderate drinkers or abstainers.

Although the data in the paper puts a positive spin on binge drinking, one thing is for sure: “I would not go out and binge drink as a result of reading this paper!” said Cutler.