TY - JOUR AU - Kenkel, Don AU - Wang, Ping TI - Are Alcoholics in Bad Jobs? JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 6401 PY - 1998 Y2 - February 1998 DO - 10.3386/w6401 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6401 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6401.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Donald S. Kenkel Department of Policy Analysis and Management College of Human Ecology Cornell University Martha Van Rensselaer Hall Ithaca, NY 14853-4401 Tel: 607/255-2594 Fax: 607/255-0799 E-Mail: dsk10@cornell.edu Ping Wang Department of Economics Washington University in St. Louis Campus Box 1208 One Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130-4899 Tel: 314/935-5632 Fax: 314/935-4156 E-Mail: pingwang@wustl.edu M1 - published as Donald S. Kenkel, Ping Wang. "Are Alcoholics in Bad Jobs?," in Frank J. Chaloupka, Michael Grossman, Warren K. Bickel and Henry Saffer, editors, "The Economic Analysis of Substance Use and Abuse: An Integration of Econometric and Behavioral Economic Research" University of Chicago Press (1999) AB - Alcohol abuse has important implications for the productivity of the US workforce. The lost earnings of workers suffering from alcohol problems have been estimated at $36.6 billion in 1990. After completing schooling, young workers face critical labor market choices with long-ranging consequences for future jobs and lifetime earnings, while many of them also drink alcohol to excess. In this paper, we provide evidence on whether the drinking choices of young adults also have long-ranging consequences for future jobs and lifetime earnings. In doing so we extend previous research on the productivity effects of alcohol to include non-wage job attributes as part of total employee compensation. The goal of this research is to establish benchmark empirical patterns describing relationships between alcoholism and job choice. Our empirical results based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) data show that male alcoholics are less likely to receive a variety of fringe benefits, are more likely to be injured on the job, and work for smaller firms. When the conventional methodology is extended to include non-wage job attributes, of an estimated total loss of $2,380 per alcoholic, about $450, or almost 20% or the total, is the value of the lost fringe benefits. The data also show that male alcoholics are less likely to be in a white collar occupation but conditional upon being in a white collar occupation their earnings are similar to their non-alcoholic peers. While alcoholics are more likely to be in a blue collar occupation, conditional upon being in such an occupation they are estimated to earn 15% less than their non-alcoholic peers. These findings help evaluate the potential effects of alcohol, education and income policies and health policy. ER -