Smoking is one of the leading preventable causes of death in every developed economy. In the U.S. smoking is estimated to be a significant cause of more than 400,000 premature deaths annually. Recent policy debates in most countries have tended to focus on how to prevent youth from starting to smoke. Embedded in these debates is a stylized fact that has yet to be established in a systematic way – whether smoking by an older family member (parents and/or older siblings) leads youth to be more likely to take up smoking. In this paper we use data from the British Household Panel Study to try to estimate whether the relationship is causal. We estimate both naive models that ignore the endogeneity of the smoking decisions of family members and models that control for those choices. Even when instrumented, our models suggest that there might be a causal effect of parental smoking, especially when mothers are considered.
Presented by:
Laura Fumagalli (ISER, with Dean Lillard, Cornell University/DIW-Berlin)
Date & time:
February 2, 2011 1:00 pm - February 2, 2011 2:00 pm
Internal seminars home