You booze, you lose? No, says new research

Binge drinking may have its benefits.

High school binge drinkers, though they tend to have a harder time landing jobs, end up with a six percent higher earning potential than their non-drinking peers, according to a September report by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The findings, based on data gathered by the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), were reported by Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Pinka Chatterji and University of South Florida economics professor Jeffrey DeSimone. The study followed 12,000 publicand private-school students over the course of 12 years, starting at eighth grade.

Among males, teen binge drinking — defined as the successive consumption of five or more drinks in one night — predicted lower employment levels but higher salaries at age 26. The correlations did not hold, however, for female binge drinkers, or for students of either sex who drank moderately.

DeSimone and Chatterji controlled for such confounding factors as race, socioeconomic level, standardized test scores and moderate adult drinking, and continued to find a positive correspondence between binge drinking in high school and wage earnings at age 26.

"We anticipated the wage effect would be something like we observed for the employment effect ... or maybe would be positive at first but would go away once we held constant factors like adult drinking," DeSimone said in an email. "We certainly weren't expecting a positive coefficient on teen drinking that persists despite whatever else we included in the equation and is twice as large as that on adult drinking."

DeSimone explained, however, that "correlation does not necessarily imply causation."

"Male high school students should understand that we in no way are saying that binge drinking will help them earn higher wages later."

Like many colleges nationwide, Princeton has dealt with significant levels of binge drinking in the past. Close to half the students surveyed by University Health Services in its 1998 Core Survey qualified as binge drinkers for consuming five or more drinks in one sitting at least once in the two weeks prior to the survey.

On an average weekend, Public Safety takes care of four to five intoxicated students who require medical attention, Public Safety director Steven Healy told The Daily Princetonian last spring.

"There is rarely a time, a day, when we are not responding to some situation where there is someone who is intoxicated to the point of needing hospitalization or other assistance," Healy said.

Besides hospitalizations, binge drinkers also often engage in physical violence, drunk driving, and unprotected sex, according to the report.

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Why, then, do binge drinkers earn higher wages? To explain the counterintuitive result, DeSimone and Chatterji proposed that binge drinkers could possess social skills helpful for landing high-paying jobs. For example, DeSimone said, adolescent binge-drinkers may exhibit "competitiveness, popularity, aggressiveness, and risk-taking" more than their peers.

These character traits, he added, are especially likely to be found among males, at least partly explaining why males' wage premiums are higher than females'.

As for the repercussions of the study, DeSimone said, "I hope our findings will spur attempts to identify the characteristics of teen drinkers that are correlated with earning higher wages as young adults."