Social Drinkers Earn More Money

Somewhat disturbing, but ringing true in a bunch of dimensions… This study shows that social drinkers earn more money than non-drinkers, and claims it’s because of the increase in social capital gained by knocking one back with colleagues.

Although there is a united campaign to restrict alcohol, labor market data may surprise noneconomists: recent studies indicate that drinking and individual earnings are positively correlated. Instead of earning less money than nondrinkers, drinkers earn more. One explanation is that drinking improves physical health, which in turn affects earnings (Hamilton and Hamilton, 1997). We contend that there is an economic explanation. We hypothesize that drinking enhances social capital, which leads to superior market outcomes. Glaeser et al. (2000: 4) describe social capital as “a person's social characteristics, including social skills, charisma, and the size of his Rolodex, which enable him to reap market and nonmarket returns from interactions with others.” Some aspects of social capital might be innate, but people can enhance others, such as Rolodex size. If social drinking increases social capital, social drinking could also increase earnings. We attempt to test whether drinking enhances social capital by differentiating between social and nonsocial drinking; we predict that those who drink in public will have higher earnings than those who drink at home. New data confirm that drinkers earn more, and we find that social drinkers earn even more.

The article is here and comes with a somewhat scary libertarian slant intro, be warned:No Booze? You May Lose:Why Drinkers Earn More Money Than Nondrinkers (pdf). Note, this obviously supports the value of conference trip networking as important for career, if money is an indicator of career success (it is to some).