【主讲】Eric Mak (Department of Economics, University of Toronto)
【主题】Tracking Adolescent Maturation using Risky Behaviors
【时间】2015年1月22日 (周四) 15：30-17：00
【地点】上海财经大学经济学院楼801室
【语言】英文
【摘要】Adolescent risky behavior is an enduring source of policy concern. According to one plausibleexplanation, adolescents engage in risky behaviors because of a lack of self-control; they gain selfcontrolas they mature, causing them to quit or moderate their actions. This explanation is difficultto test given that the maturation process is not observed directly, yet behavioral changes by age canbe used to shed light on the underlying nature of maturation. To that end, this paper constructsthe first behavioral framework to analyze both the effect of maturation on risky behaviors and thetiming of maturation. In measuring the effect of maturation, situational changes among observationallysimilar individuals could in principle be differenced out as in a difference-in-differences analysis if thetiming of the treatment – when the adolescents mature – were known. In practice, it is not. To solvethis identification problem, I develop a two-part strategy that allows me to recover both the effect ofmaturation and its timing for each individual. First, assuming the timing of maturation is known, Iapply a standard difference-in-differences analysis, using relative changes between the now-matureindividuals and their peers to identify the maturation effect; second, given the maturation effect, thetiming is identified as a structural break for each individual. In this way, the two parts complementeach other to achieve joint identification. Based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth1997, I find that the estimated maturation age distributions for males and females both peak at age 21,and are right-skewed. As one policy-relevant application of the framework and estimates, I decomposethe age profiles as a guide in setting the legal drinking age. Here I show that a counterfactual increasein the legal age from 21 to 23 could, assuming perfect enforcement, lead to a 6.8% decrease in thebinge-drinking rate for females, in contrast to the actual increase of 1.5% (on a base of 41%). Myanalysis therefore suggests that even though the current legal drinking age in the United States of 21is on the conservative side, a further increase may be justified by the late maturation of many youngPeople.
