Could smoking be hurting how much you earn at work?
Aug 1, 2013, 10:03 PM | Updated: 10:03 pm
If you would like to kick the habit of smoking out of your life but can’t find the motivation to do it, new research might just be the answer.
According to TODAY Money, a paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found that smokers earn just about 80 percent of what non-smokers make.
But professionals like Jack Bradway said smoking a pack hasn’t affected his earnings.
If he didn’t smoke, he said, “It just means I’d be at my desk for a total of maybe 30 minutes more.”
Economists Julie Hotchkiss and Melinda Pitts, the authors of the research said that the wage gap between smokers and those who don’t is mostly due to demographics.
The two researchers attribute about 60 percent of the wage gap between smokers and nonsmokers to demographic differences — collectively, smokers tend to be less-educated than nonsmokers, for instance — but the rest were ascribed to what they called, “unmeasured factors.”
Some other factors that could be contributing to this difference in wage earnings might depend on personality traits – smokers tend to lack self-control and less will power, which are not considered to be the qualities of a leader, making smokers stand in line waiting for that bonus, raise or promotion.
If smoke, do you think it has affected how much money you’re making?
