High time to study the relationship between marijuana use and economic behavior

Abstract

With the increased acceptance of marijuana, it is important to understand the impacts of its use. While much attention has been paid to concerns such as health, relatively little attention has been paid to the relationship between marijuana use and basic economic behavior. This experimental study uses incentivized tasks to measure prosocial behavior, risk-taking, memory, cognitive ability, and responsiveness to incentives for 374 subjects, and examines how these behaviors vary with frequency of marijuana use. The general results provide little evidence that increased marijuana is associated with any change in these basic behaviors. Despite the fact that we observe males to be more frequent users of marijuana, more willing to take risks, and more selfish, the general lack off a relationship between economic behavior and frequency of marijuana use holds for both males and females. Relationships between caffeine, tobacco, and alcohol use and basic economic behavior are also analyzed.