Don’t Drink and… Avoid Risky Sex of Your Peers: The Influence of Alcohol Consumption of Opposite-Gender Peers on Youth Risky Sexual Behavior

I estimate the effect of opposite-gender peer drinking on individual risky sexual behavior among Czech youth. The identification strategy relies on two main controls for individual and groupspecific unobservables. First, younger schoolmates’ sexual behavior is a control for school-specific attitudes toward sexual behavior. Second, pre-determined individual pre-secondary-school alcohol consumption is used to control for self-selection into schools of individuals with specific attitudes toward alcohol. As opposed to Waddell (2010), I find that female drinking affects the male propensity to have unprotected sex, while male drinking does not have such an effect on female behavior. This finding corresponds to the fact that females have usually older sexual partners than males