期刊名称：DIW Diskussionspapiere / Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Berlin
出版年度：2008
卷号：2008
出版社：Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Berlin
摘要：The positive association between moderate alcohol consumption and wages is well
documented in the economic literature. Positive health effects as well as
networking mechanisms serve as explanations for the "alcohol-income puzzle."
Using individual-based microdata from the GSOEP for 2006, we confirm that this
relationship exists for Germany as well. More importantly, we shed light on the
alcohol-income puzzle by analyzing, for the first time, the association between
beverage-specific drinking behavior and wages. In our analysis, we disentangle
the general wage effect of drinking into diverse effects for different types of
drinkers. Mincerian estimates reveal significant and positive relationships
between wine drinkers and wages as well as between beverage-unspecific drinkers
and wages. We are unable to detect endogeneity problems with the drinking
variables, which speaks in favor of OLS regressions. When splitting the sample
into age groups, the "wine gain" disappears for employees under the age of 35
and increases in size and significance for higher age groups. We also find a
"beer gain" for residents of rural areas and a "cocktail gain" for residents of
urban areas. Several explanations for our empirical results are discussed in
view of the likelihood that the alcohol-income puzzle is a multicausal
phenomenon.
