New Insights on the Relationship between Substance Use and Schooling
According to the CDC, excessive alcohol use leads to 2.5 million years of potential life lost each year in the United States. Given the importance of alcohol use, research identifying the causes and consequences of alcohol use is vital. The proposed session includes a cohesive set of three papers, all of which seek to uncover causal relationships pertaining to alcohol use. The session will be chaired by Ana Balsa from the University of Miami, and each paper has an assigned discussant, including Christopher Carpenter, Gulcin Gumus, and Richard Dunn. Paper 1 will be presented by Nathan Tefft from Bates College. This paper investigates the health effects of college education, including smoking, drinking, and body mass index, using tuition increases as a plausibly exogenous source of identifying variation in college attendance. Paper 2 will be presented by Jason Fletcher of the University of Wisconsin – Madison. This paper concerns social spillovers in smoking and drinking behaviors among spouses in the context of evaluating the cost effectiveness of treatments. The authors find that spillovers to spousal behaviors can dramatically affect the cost effectiveness. Paper 3 will be presented by Scott Adams from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. Paper 3 concerns unintended positive consequences of extending bar smoking bans to e-cigarettes. The authors find that when states extend these bans to e-cigarettes, binge drinking among 21-30 year olds decreases while binge drinking stays constant for those under age 21 or over age 50.