IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/labour/v14y2000i4p657-673.html

The Wages of Sin? Illegal Drug Use and the Labour Market

Author

Listed:
  • Ziggy MacDonald
  • Stephen Pudney

Abstract

type="main" xml:lang="en"> We use data from the British Crime Survey (BCS) to analyse the relationship between illicit drug use and labour market outcomes for a sample of men and women aged 16–25. In using these data we highlight a serious design flaw in the BCS questionnaire structure that presents a serious barrier to statistical modelling of drug use at the individual level. We propose a simple way of overcoming this problem and proceed to estimate a model of occupational attainment jointly determined with unemployment and current drug use, conditional on past drug use. Separating the commonly abused drugs into a ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ category, we find that past hard drug use has a significant positive association with current unemployment, but find no significant association between past hard or soft drug use and occupational attainment. We also find no significant association between current drug use and attainment, although we observe that current drug use is associated with current unemployment.

Suggested Citation

  • Ziggy MacDonald & Stephen Pudney, 2000. "The Wages of Sin? Illegal Drug Use and the Labour Market," LABOUR, CEIS, vol. 14(4), pages 657-673, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:labour:v:14:y:2000:i:4:p:657-673
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/1467-9914.00151
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lindsey Richardson & Anita Minh & Deb McCormack & Allison Laing & Skye Barbic & Kanna Hayashi & M.-J. Milloy & Kimberly R. Huyser & Kathleen Leahy & Johanna Li, 2022. "Cohort Profile: The Assessing Economic Transitions (ASSET) Study—A Community-Based Mixed-Methods Study of Economic Engagement among Inner-City Residents," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 19(16), pages 1-24, August.
    2. Wang, Haining & Smyth, Russell & Cheng, Zhiming, 2017. "The economic returns to proficiency in English in China," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 91-104.
    3. Jenny Williams & Christopher L. Skeels, 2006. "The impact of cannabis and cigarette use on health," Department of Economics - Working Papers Series 969, The University of Melbourne.
    4. Ziggy MacDonald, 2004. "What Price Drug Use? The Contribution of Economics to an Evidence‐Based Drugs Policy," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 18(2), pages 113-152, April.
    5. Jenny Williams & Christopher Skeels, 2006. "The Impact of Cannabis Use on Health," De Economist, Springer, vol. 154(4), pages 517-546, December.
    6. Antón, José-Ignacio & Ponce, Juan & Muñoz de Bustillo, Rafael, 2024. "Road to perdition? The effect of illicit drug use on labour market outcomes of prime-age men in Mexico," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 55(C).
    7. M. D. R. Evans & Jonathan Kelley, 2004. "Effects of Family of Origin on Women’s and Men’s Workforce Involvement," Melbourne Institute Working Paper Series wp2004n25, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne.
    8. Matt Dickson, 2013. "The Causal Effect of Education on Wages Revisited," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 75(4), pages 477-498, August.
    9. Ziggy MacDonald, 2002. "The Employment Prospects of Scottish and English Drug Abusers," Discussion Papers in Economics 02/2, Division of Economics, School of Business, University of Leicester.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:labour:v:14:y:2000:i:4:p:657-673. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/csrotit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.