Adverse Events and Risky Behaviors: Evidence from Adolescents

With adverse effects on health, education, and employment outcomes, risky behaviors like substance use can be extremely costly, especially for youths. They are also exceedingly common. This paper considers a potential explanation for this prevalence: distressing life events may lead individuals to engage in risky behaviors as a coping response. This theory is separate from models of risky behavior that emphasize rational addiction or time-inconsistent preferences, and distinct from a non-rational System 1–System 2 framework. To test for a coping response, I use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth on children of the 1979 cohort. I begin by considering how adolescents’ probability of trying four substances—cigarettes, binge drinking, marijuana, and other illegal drugs—is affected by experiencing either of two events: violent crime victimization or death of a non-family member to whom the respondent felt close. Results show statistically significant increases in first use of cigarettes and of illegal drugs other than marijuana following adverse events. Such shocks explain 6.7 percent of first cigarette use, and 14.3 percent of first illegal drug use, with controls and specification checks indicating that peer pressure, differential access, and neighborhood factors do not drive these results. Falsification tests support the adverse event exogeneity assumption. Next, I show that such events also influence a positive coping mechanism—days exercised per week—in a manner consistent with the coping-response theory, but not with rational, time-inconsistent, or non-rational models. I conclude that distressing events lead to risky behaviors, with a coping response contributing to this effect.