This paper explores the impacts of pseudo-mature behaviors (PMBs), school activities, and social identity on early adult outcomes, specifically the likelihood of college attendance and annual earnings. We define the PMBs to include (binge) drinking alcohol, cigarette smoking, and sexual activity. A student's school activities involve his/her participation in sports, non-sports, and mixed clubs. The incorporation of such measures into our analysis highlights the importance of social identity, a concept that is popular in sociology but often not traditionally emphasized in economics. We use data obtained from the Restricted-Use National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). A two-step estimation procedure is used that allows for the possible endogeneity of the PMBs. Much of the literature has struggled to find good identifying instruments; French and Popovici (2011) provide a nice summary of the approaches undertaken by researchers to identify non-weak instruments (IVs). Correspondingly, we use maternal binge drinking and popularity as per Renna (2007, 2009) and Mundt and French (2013), respectively, and also control for a single parent household, which is supported by Peer Cluster Theory, but new to the literature. Our analysis also controls for peer-group effects with the incorporation of grade fixed effects and robust errors that are clustered at the school-level. The primary empirical work is conducted using relative PMB measures (e.g., drinking in excess of one’s school peers). Many (e.g., Balsa et al., 2010; Gaviria and Raphael, 2001) in the literature have argued that the relevant peer group for a teen is his/her classmates.
We perform a few robustness checks whereby we investigate the possibility that the effects of PMBs vary by grade and we also consider alternative measures of drinking (e.g., binge drinking) and adult outcomes (e.g., receipt of high school diploma). These exercises support our preliminary conclusions that excessive drinking has a statistically significant effect for females on educational outcomes but the sign varies by choice of IV. We find a negative (positive) and statistically significant effect of excessive smoking (past sexual activity) on male (female) academic accomplishments. The inclusion of school-level activities yield positive, significant, and sizable effects, however. This suggests that participation in extra curricular activities are important in determining an adolescent’s long-run trajectory and may even offset any negative effects associated with PMBs. These results have implications for public policy both in terms of education and the continued funding of extra curricular activities.
