Women and work: tipplers and teetotalers

John Mullahy () and Jody L. Sindelar

Health Economics, 1997, vol. 6, issue 5, 533-537

Abstract: We seek to understand better the puzzling finding that, for women, alcoholism appears to be positively associated with the probability of being employed. Using the 1988 Alcohol Survey of the National Health Interview Survey, we find that this association holds for white women only. For white women, alcoholism and early drinking are associated with higher educational attainment, a smaller family size and a lower probability of being married. In turn, these human capital indicators are associated with greater labour supply, thus helping to explain the curious positive relationship between alcoholism and employment for women. An advance in this paper over our previous work is to examine life‐time abstention from alcohol and its association with employment and human capital variables. We find that lifetime abstention is associated with lower: employment, unemployment and education and greater propensity to be married for both white and non‐white women. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Date: 1997
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-1050(199709)6:53.0.CO;2-F

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:hlthec:v:6:y:1997:i:5:p:533-537

Access Statistics for this article

Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones

More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().