The Effect Of Smoking And Drinking On The Income Of Chinese Urban Residents And Their Spouses

The current number of smokers in our country has exceeded300million. More than one million people die from diseases caused by smoking every year. This number is larger than the sum of people that die from tuberculosis, the accidents, AIDS and suicide. Smoking also has negative externality-secondhand smoke. Passive smokers get more serious health damage than smokers. The number of passive smokers has reached540million, of which180million are children under15. The annual number of deaths due to passive smoking is more than100,000.The damage of drinking on our body is not that strong like smoking. Drinking appropriately could reduce the incidence of coronary heart disease. However, drinking excessively is harm to our liver. Moreover, drinking also has negative externalities. Driving after drinking might cause an accident, which endanger the drinker and the people around. Drinking might also bring losses to their family members because of violence after drinking. And their family members might use more time to take care of them.Smoking and drinking not only bring costs to the doer, but also have negative externalities. However, there are still a large number of smokers and drinkers in China. This paper attempts to explore the motive behind smoking and drinking. We use Chinese survey data to find the relationship in smoking, drinking and income. We want to explore if smoking and drinking could bring about positive effects on income when we control other factors. Furthermore, smoking and drinking could also affect the doers’ spouse. So we also want to find the effect of smoking and drinking on spouses’ income. This paper attempts to estimate the impact of smoking and drinking on themselves’income and their spouse’s incomeThis article uses the random effects model and Pooled OLS, and uses Mincer model which add smoking and drinking by themselves and their spouses, to estimate the impact of smoking and drinking on their own income and their spouses’income when control other variables.This paper has two major innovations.Firstly, As far as I know, they have not considered the impact of smoking and drinking on the income of other related people whether in domestic or foreign literature. And we take the externalities of smoking and drinking into account. We also find the impact of smoking and drinking on the income of their spouse. Secondly, we use random-effects model rather than fixed effects model to estimate the effect. We supplement the research about relationship in smoking, drinking and income, which is rarely involved in domestic literature.When we exclude other factors’effects, smoking cannot significantly raise the doers’income, nor do their spouses’ income. The results may indicate that smoking has no social return, and it cannot increase income by enhancing their communicative competence. So quitting smoking is a better choice for people. However, drinking has some social return. It can significantly improve income by consolidating interpersonal relationships. It can also significantly improve spouses’income in some cases. Because of the return and costs of drinking, we need more consideration when we decide whether we drink.