New research in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health shows that women with higher levels of educational attainment are more likely to binge-drink in their early twenties, but stop thereafter. See the story "here".
However, women with lower levels of educational attainmet are more likely to binge-drink through their 40's. Less educated women having babies earlier is suggested as one reason to explain this trend.
Perhaps if a women has spent all her life looking after her children until her early 40's, she may be faced with a situation at that stage where she has no labour-market experience, while at the same time having lost all active involvement in the development of her children. Could boredom lead to bingeing?
Its certainly likely that college-educated women will never be as bored, as they will have much better career-options, and could even work right through their children's early childhood and school years through being able to afford child-care, baby-sitters etc.
If this all fits together, then there's a strong case to address the problem of negative internalities arising from non-market work in the home...
2 comments:
This reminds me a bit of Bridget Jones's Diary, I'm afraid. I haven't scooted through the article yet, but it would seem to be the case that college-educated women would pick up a habit of reasonably heavy drinkign in an environment where there's little discernible decrement in performance: being late in attending college and submitting coursework are ubiquitous in universities, whereas homologous failures would lead to the sack in the workplace.
Jonathan Gruber has an "internalities" piece on smoking thats on the link below
http://econ-www.mit.edu/faculty/download_pdf.php?id=981
The Jan 2007 Becker-Posner blog debate the merit of libertarian paternalism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, neither is taken with the idea.
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