Human development and alcohol abuse in adolescence

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyse the development of human capital in adolescents, as represented by their state of health and educational attainment, when this capital is affected by the abusive consumption of alcohol measured by grams of ethanol. To that end, we adopt a theoretical framework derived from the Model of Rational Addiction, the Model of Health Demand and the Model of Schooling Demand, which is then estimated by using data drawn from the Spanish National Survey on Drug Use in the School Population (1996, 1998, 2000). Results confirm that higher alcohol consumption leads to worse health states and lower academic efficiency among adolescents, which suggests the need to implement effective policies aimed at reducing alcohol abuse among this population group.

Acknowledgements

This article was partially written while Ana Isabel Gil was a Visiting Researcher at the Health and Social Care Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science, and she would like to express her gratitude for the hospitality and facilities provided by this institution. Similarly, the authors are indebted to Elias Mossialos and Joan Costa-Font for their valuable observations. Earlier versions of this article have been presented at the Spanish Health Economics Meeting-2002 (Pamplona, Spain), at the International Health Economic Association Meeting-2003 (San Francisco, EEUU), and in a seminar held at the Department of Economics of University College Dublin-2004 (Dublin, Ireland), with all the comments made by the participants, especially those of Kevin Denny and David Madden, being particularly appreciated. Finally, the authors would like to express their thanks for the financial support provided by the Spanish Ministry of Education-CICYT and the European Commission (Project 2FD97-2057).

Notes

¹ Although we have recently witnessed a significant increase in the number of articles dedicated to studying the negative relationships between the human capital of adolescents and their abusive alcohol consumption, the majority of these are focused on only one form of human capital, e.g. health state (Keng and Wallace, 1999; Dee, 1999; Levy, 2000; Bonomo et al ., 2001; Lakdawalla et al ., 2001) or educational achievement (Mullahy and Sindelar, 1989, 1994; Cook and Moore, 1993; Yamada et al ., 1996; Koch and Ribar, 2001; Dee and Evans, 2003; Williams and Wechsler, 2003).

² We have used Matematica 4.0 in order to solve this optimization problem. All the detailed expressions derived from this resolution are available from the authors upon request.

³ Following Keng and Wallace (1998), in the specification of the econometric model, we have omitted those lagged endogenous variables whose presence may give rise to multicolinearity.