Early illicit drug use and the age of onset of homelessness

Duncan McVicar (Queen's University Belfast, UK; Institute of Labor Economics, Bonn, Germany), Julie Moschion (University of Melbourne, Australia; Institute of Labor Economics, Bonn, Germany) and Jan C. van Ours (University of Melbourne, Australia; Institute of Labor Economics, Bonn, Germany; Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Tinbergen Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Centre for Economic Policy Research, London, UK) published in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Statistics in Society Series A Volume 182 Issue 1 (January 2019)

Summary

We investigate the effect of taking up daily use of cannabis on the onset of homelessness by using Australian data.

We use a bivariate simultaneous mixed proportional hazard model to address potential biases due to common unobservable factors and reverse causality. We find that taking up daily use of cannabis substantially increases the probability of transitioning into homelessness for young men but not young women.

In contrast, the onset of homelessness increases the probability of taking up daily use of cannabis for young women but not for young men.

In a trivariate extension we find that the use of other illicit drugs at least weekly has no additional effect on transitions into homelessness for either gender but there is a large if imprecisely estimated effect of onset of homelessness on taking up weekly use of such drugs for young women.

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