Search Results

Title: Adolescent Drinking and High School Dropout
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Chatterji, Pinka
Desimone, Jeffrey Scott
Adolescent Drinking and High School Dropout
NBER Working Paper No. 11337, National Bureau of Economic Research, May 2005.
Also: http://papers.nber.org/papers/W11337
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79, NLSY79 Young Adult
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Keyword(s): Alcohol Use; Behavior Problems Index (BPI); CESD (Depression Scale); Depression (see also CESD); Educational Attainment; High School Dropouts; Human Capital; Intergenerational Patterns/Transmission; Modeling; Mothers, Behavior; Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT); Variables, Instrumental

This paper estimates the effect of binge and frequent drinking by adolescents on subsequent high school dropout using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Young Adults. We estimate an instrumental variables model with an indicator of any past month alcohol use, which is by definition correlated with heavy drinking but should have minimal additional impact on educational outcomes, as the identifying instrument, and also control for a rich set of potentially confounding variables, including maternal characteristics and dropout risk factors measured before and during adolescence. In comparison, OLS provides conservative estimates of the causal impact of heavy drinking on dropping out, implying that binge or frequent drinking among 15 - 16 year old students lowers the probability of having graduated or being enrolled in high school four years later by at least 11 percent. Overidentification tests using two measures of maternal youthful alcohol use as additional instruments support our identification strategy.
Bibliography Citation
Chatterji, Pinka and Jeffrey Scott Desimone. "Adolescent Drinking and High School Dropout." NBER Working Paper No. 11337, National Bureau of Economic Research, May 2005.