Health, like schooling, is a form of human capital and can be expected to be positively related to labor productivity and labor supply. The production of good health and labor productivity, however, sometimes competes with an individual's lifestyle, e.g., binge drinking. In this study, an individual's health has three dimensions: current health status, binge drinking which is an unhealthy lifestyle, and stature or mature height which is a young adult's health endowment. This study presents and fits a dynamic model of an individual's demand for health, demand for binge drinking, labor supply, and wage or demand for labor equations to NLSY 1979 cohort panel data of young people. We find that binge drinking has a negative but insignificant effect on the... |