1,721,116 research outputs found
Addiction and Alcohol consumption at the household and individual level: theory and applications
No full textNon disponibileIn modern societies, it is a common opinion to consider alcohol consumption as
a social problem, especially when consumed habitually in large quantities or when binge
drinking is a relevant phenomenon. The negative effects to the individuals and the society
are numerous and cover several fields. Numerous examples could be given, as liver
diseases, car crashes, violence, and so on. These consequences of alcohol consumption
have long been studied in medical and sociological fields, but, in our opinion, still not
enough has been done from the economic perspective. If policy makers pursue the objective
of reducing alcohol consumption, or at least its negative affects, economists should
give them accurate instruments to properly evaluate and predict the consequences of
such policies, including benefits or losses in terms of social welfare.
To accomplish this duty, a firts step consists in classifying properly the negative
effects of alcohol consumption, allowing to focus on specific objectives and to find specific
indications for each class of issues. Our proposal is to distinguish between individual
effects, household effects and social effects.
The individual effects are those direct effects which consumption of alcoholic
beverages brings to the drinker itsef. These effects include general health diseases, liver
diseases, emargination, car crashes consequences, working problem, lack of concentration
and so on. From an economic point of view, several of these aspects can be synthesized
by the loss of utility due to the addiction status of the consumer.
In economics, the usual tool for analyzing addiction is the Rational Addiction
model (RA) by Becker & Murphy (1988). This model represents an important milestone
in the modelling of addiction since it started an important empirical literature on addiction.
The use of this model has been criticised by several authors both because of some
simplyfing assumptions and because applications of this model to real data have been
often conducted without taking into account some peculiar statistical issues (Gruber &
Köszegi, 2001; Gul & Pesendorfer, 2001; Lowenstein et al. , 2003; Auld & Grootendorst,
2004; Bernheim & Rangel, 2004; Wangen, 2004). The model, however, is still widely
used to empirically test for the presence of addiction, mainly because of the simplicity
of the linear Euler equation which has to be estimated.
In this work an estimate of the Rational Addiction model is conducted using
a series of Italian cross sectional data on households expenditure on alcoholic beverages.
Using these data, which allows to analize individual expenditure on alcohol, the
hypothesis of addiction is rejected. Even though this result may be driven by the fact
that if alcohol is consumed in moderate quantities it is unlikely to cause addiction, we
believe that perplexities and critics around the RA model have to be taken properly
into account befor making statements of absence of addiction to alcohol in the Italian
society. This is one of the reasons for which we propose an extended model, which could
possibly overcome some shortages of the RA model and allow for more robust results.
Household effects arise when alcohol consumption not only causes problems
to the consumer itself, but also to its family (household level externalities). Typical
examples of these externalities are violence, serenity deprivation, the diminished economic
resources left for the household members and so on. In particular, in this work
we focus on the intra-household distribution of resources to verify whether households
with a heavy drinker show a different behavior in distributing resources between household’s
members. In Chapter 6 we apply the Collective Choice model (Apps & Rees,
1988; Chiappori, 1988, 1992) to Italian households and find that when a relatively large
amount of alcohol is consumed, the distribution of resources within the household is
shifted from the average distribution, and that this difference is greater for low income
households..
ISOLAMENTO E CARATTERIZZAZIONE DI STAFILOCOCCHI ISOLATI DA PAZIENTI AFFETTI DA MALATTIA PARODONTALE E DA SOGGETTI SANI.
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Collective Consumption: An Application to the Passive Drinking Effect
No full textThis study introduces a new collective complete demand system with individual Engel effects that is easy to estimate and permits undertaking policy analysis at the indi- vidual rather than household level. Previous estimations of collective demand were limited to single equations. The empirical application investigates the passive drinking effect, that is, whether consumption of alcohol affects the distribution of resources among household members and their level of wellbeing. The results show that a high level of alcohol consump- tion of one household member significantly affects the allocation of household resources and suggest thought-provoking policy implications
Parental alcohol consumption and adult children's educational attainment
No full textThis study analyses whether an excessive parental alcohol consumption during childhood can affect long run children's educational attainments. Using 19 waves of the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS), where individuals and their families are followed from childhood to adulthood, this study analyses parental alcohol consumption during childhood (between 1994 and 2001) and its relation with children's educational attainment about twelve years later (from 2005 to 2014). Panel estimations show that mother's excessive alcohol consumption during childhood is consistently negatively associated with children educational outcomes, as years of education, the highest education grade achieved and the probability of having a tertiary education degree, a finding that is robust to possible endogeneity issues. In particular, while moderate drinking is not an issue, an additional standard glass of vodka (15.57 g of pure alcohol) consumed by the mother per day, reduces years of education by almost one year (0.88), and by 5.8 percentage points (or about 27%) the probability of having a university degree. The study also explores the transmission mechanisms suggested by the literature, identifying a significant role for prenatal exposure to alcohol and, to a lesser extent, for intergenerational transmission of drinking habits
L’ENDOCARDITE INFETTIVA NEI TOSSICODIPENDENTI PER VIA VENOSA: IMPLICAZIONI ODONTOIATRICHE
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