Job Mobility and Drug Use: An Event History Analysis

Life and drug histories collected in a longitudinal cohort of young adults age 24-25 are analyzed to specify the dynamic relationships between patterns of drug use and job separations. Three patterns of drug use are investigated: daily alcohol use, monthly use of marijuana, and monthly use of other illicit drugs. Job changes followed immediately by another job are distinghished from job losses not followed by new employment within a month. Two processes assumed to underlie the relationship between drug use and job mobility are distinguished: selection, in which individual predispositions account the self-selection into job separation, and causation, which reflects the specific effects of drug use on job separation. Drug use has a strong effect on job separation, which appears to be mainly a selection effect, however. The results document the importance of drug use in predicting high job mobility and subsequent unemployment in late adolescence and early adulthood. The neglect of this life-style factor in prior analyses has led to overestimations of the negative effects of job duration and marital status and the positive effect of prior experience of a job separation on future separations.