ISER Working Paper Series 2007-31
The smoker's wage penalty puzzle: evidence from Britain
Authors
Publication date
21 Dec 2007
Abstract
This work investigates the effect of smoking on wages for male workers using panel data from Britain for the period of 1991-2005. The strong negative correlation of smoking and wages found in a crosssectional analysis reduces substantially when accounting for unobserved individual heterogeneity using Fixed Effects estimation. I find a statistically significant wage penalty that is causally due to smoking of about -2% for smokers over those who quit. Further analysis indicates, however, that the negative effect might be underestimated when comparing with those who never started smoking or quit a long time ago.
Notes
working paper
#510671