Drugs, Money, and Family: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Household Composition and Illegal Labor Market Income

Despite the few studies on the illegal earnings of drug sellers, the motivating factors that cause some social actors to enter the illicit drug market as sellers remains unknown. Using pooled data from the Arrestee and Drug Abuse Monitoring Program (ADAM), I investigate how household size and composition affect illegal wages earned from illicit drug sales. My findings support existing studies on the economic returns to drug selling, but I also show that, contrary to widely held arguments, sellers living in two-parent households earn almost the same as sellers from single-parent households.