How Does Alcohol Consumption Affect People’s Income

With the development of society and technology, it has seen a dramatic rise in people's living standards. Wine as a high level of consumer goods in people's daily lives accounts for an increasing proportion. Therefore, the relationship between people's per capita income needs to be studied further. The research using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) data mainly utilized a multiple linear regression model to create a linear relationship between alcohol behaviors and wages. It introduced a method of the instrumental variable to eliminate the endogenous problems in the model. The drinking behaviors were divided into two groups based on the number of drinks consumed per day, and to make our conclusion more reasonable, samples that have more than 4 drinks per day were dropped in the research. After fixing the model using an instrumental variable, the coefficients of the independent variables are positive and tested to be valid, which means moderate alcohol use positively impacts people's wages. Although we get the results not consistent with other related researches, our conclusion still has some practical implications. Moderate alcohol use is beneficial to the heart and cerebrovascular health, especially to the long-term overtime workers. Still, it alleviates the brain's pressure, which improves cognitive performance and increases the work's productivity. Therefore, drinking alcohol properly is a wise choice, which can keep us healthy and increase our income compared to drinking excessively.