Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Adolescents alcohol-use and economic conditions: a multilevel analysis of data from a period with big economic changes

  • Original Paper
  • Published:
The European Journal of Health Economics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper examines how the unemployment rate is related to adolescent alcohol use and experience of binge drinking during a time period characterized by big societal changes. The paper uses repeated cross-sectional adolescent survey data from a Swedish region, collected in 1988, 1991, 1995, 1998, 2002 and 2005, and merges this with data on local unemployment rates for the same time periods. Individual level frequency of alcohol use as well as experience of binge drinking is connected to local level unemployment rate to estimate the relationship using multilevel modeling. The model includes municipality effects controlling for time-invariant differences between municipalities as well as year fixed effects controlling for municipality-invariant changes over time in alcohol use. The results show that the unemployment rate is negatively associated with adolescents’ alcohol use and the experience of binge drinking. When the unemployment rate increases, more adolescents do not drink at all. Regular drinking (twice per month or more) is, on the other hand, unrelated to the unemployment rate. Examining gender-differences in the relationship, it is shown that the results are driven by behavior in girls, whereas drinking among boys does not show any significant relationship with changes in the unemployment rate.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Two municipalities were excluded because of non participation in 1 year (1995).

  2. For example, in 2005, 68% used alcohol at least once (100–31.74%) and 52.5% report binge drinking at least once. This leaves a proportion of ~16% of adolescents reporting to have used alcohol but not reporting a large amount on one specific occasion (binge drinking).

  3. The definitions of unemployment differ slightly between the Swedish Public Employment Service (used here) and the official Labor Force Surveys conducted by Statistics Sweden (which should be used for international comparisons). However, since we are interested in the change in the unemployment rate over time for the included municipalities, the important criteria is that the data are comparable across time for the municipalities.

  4. Never drinking is the first category of the dependent variable alcohol use as shown in Table 1. Regular drinking is the proportion of adolescents drinking 2/month and 1/week or more, i.e., categories 4 and 5 of the dependent variable alcohol use as shown in Table 1.

  5. To give some examples: in economic downturns the risk of parental unemployment increases and schools may cut-back on resources and staff. In economic upturns the opposite may happen, increased likelihood of parental employment and increases in school resources, etc.

References

  1. SCB: Labour Force Survey 2007. Statistics, Sweden (2007)

  2. Pape, H., Hammer, T.: How does young people’s alcohol consumption change during the transition to early adulthood? A longitudinal study of changes at aggregate and individual level. Addiction 91, 1345–1358 (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Monti, P., Miranda, R., Nixon, K., Sher, K., Swartzwelder, S., Tapert, S., White, A., Crews, F.: Adolescence: booze, brains and behavior. Alcohol. Clin. Exp. Res. 29, 207–220 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Bonomo, Y., Coffey, C., Wolfe, R., Lynskey, M., Bowes, G., Patton, G.: Adverse outcomes of alcohol use in adolescents. Addiction 96, 1485–1496 (2001)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Jarl, J., Johansson, P., Eriksson, A., Eriksson, M., Gerdtham, U.G., Hemström, Ö., Hradilova Selin, K., Lanke, L., Ramstedt, M., Room, R.: The societal cost of alcohol consumption: an estimation of the economic and human cost including health effects in Sweden, 2002. Eur. J. Health Econ. 9, 351–360 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Arkes, J.: Does the economy affect teenage substance use? Health Econ. 16:19–36 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Bukstein, O.: Summary of the practice parameters for the assessment and treatment of children and adolescents with substance use disorders. J. Am. Acad. Child Adolesc. Psychiatry 37, 122–126 (1998)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Loeber, R., Farrington, D.P.: Serious and violent juvenile offenders: risk factors and successful interventions. Sage, Thousands Oaks, CA (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Ruhm, C.J.: Economic conditions and alcohol problems. J. Health Econ. 14, 583–603 (1995)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Ruhm, C.J., Black, W.E.: Does drinking really decrease in bad times? J. Health Econ. 21, 659–678 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Dee, T.: Alcohol abuse and economic conditions: evidence from repeated cross-sections of individual-level data. Health Econ. 10, 257–270 (2001)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Johansson, E., Böckerman, P., Prättälä, R., Uutela, A.: Alcohol-related mortality, drinking behavior, and business cycles: are slumps really dry seasons? Eur. J. Health Econ. 7, 215–220 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Krüger, N., Svensson, M.: Good times are drinking times: empirical evidence on business cycles and alcohol sales in Sweden 1861–2000. Appl. Econ. Lett. (2009). doi:10.1080/13504850802167215

  14. Bartels, B.: Beyond “fixed versus random effects”: a framework for improving substantive and statistical analysis of panel, time-series cross-sectional, and multilevel data. The Society for Political Methodology. Working paper, http://www.ms.cc.sunysb.edu/~bbartels/research.htm (2008)

  15. Rabe-Hesketh, S., Skrondal, A.: Multilevel and longitudinal modeling using stata, 2nd edn. Stata, College Station, TX (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Hagquist, C.: Variations in adolescents’ smoking and alcohol behaviour between Swedish schools—an ecological analysis. Drugs Educ. Prev. Policy 4, 139–150 (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Turner, R.J., Wheaton, B., Lloyd, D.A.: The epidemiology of social stress. Am. Sociol. Rev. 56, 166–178 (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  18. DeCoster, S.: Depression and low violation: gendered responses to gendered stresses. Sociol. Perspect. 48, 155–187 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Sigfusdottir, I.D., Silver, E.: Emotional reactions to stress among adolescent boys and girls: an examination of the mediating mechanisms proposed by general strain theory. Youth Soc. 40, 571–590 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Svensson, M., Hagquist, C.: Adolescent alcohol- and illicit drug-use in first and second generation immigrants in Sweden. Scan. J. Public Health (2009). doi:10.1177/1403494809353822

  21. Berg-Kelly, K.: Adolescent health, school health activites, community contexts, and health surveys in Sweden. J. Adolesc. Health 33, 226–230 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Grufman, M., Carlsten, C., Krabbe, M., Berg-Kelly, K.: Health and health behaviours among Swedish adolescents during a period of social change. Acta Paediatr. 88, 1380–1384 (1999)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Cook, P., Moore, M.: Alcohol. In: Culyer, A., Newhouse, J. (eds.) Handbook of health economics, vol. 1b, pp. 1629–1673. Elsevier, Amsterdam (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Lundborg, P.: Young people and alcohol: an econometric analysis. Addiction 97, 1573–1582 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Olsson, O.: Tillförlitligheten i undersökningar av skolelevers och värnpliktigas drogvanor. CAN (Swedish Council for Information on Alcohol and other drugs), Stockholm (1992)

  26. O’Donnel, S.A.: Inconsistencies over time in young adolescents’ self-reports of substance use and sexual intercourse. Subst. Use Misuse 35, 1015–1034 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. SCB: Regionalräkenskaper. http://www.scbse/templates/Product_11078asp (2008)

Download references

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Swedish Business School, Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden

    Mikael Svensson

  2. Centre for Research on Child and Adolescent Mental Health, Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden

    Mikael Svensson & Curt Hagquist

Authors
  1. Mikael Svensson
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Curt Hagquist
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mikael Svensson.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Svensson, M., Hagquist, C. Adolescents alcohol-use and economic conditions: a multilevel analysis of data from a period with big economic changes. Eur J Health Econ 11, 533–541 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10198-009-0209-7

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10198-009-0209-7

Keywords

JEL Classification

Search

Navigation