Venue: The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, 1 Towerview Drive, Durham, NC 27708-0120
Presentation
From Father and Mother to Son and Daughter? Estimating the Causal Effect of Parental Smoking on Youth Initiation
Smoking is the leading preventable cause of death in the U.S., contributing to more than 400,000 deaths annually. A recent public health initiative, Healthy People 2010, aims to cut the prevalence of smoking among adults in half, from the current rate of about 24 percent to 12 percent. Recent policy debates have tended to focus on how to prevent youth from starting to smoke. Embedded in all of the debates about youth smoking is a stylized fact that has yet to be established in a systematic way - whether the strong correlation between parental smoking and youth smoking prevalence is causal or not. The answer to this question seems, on its face, to be obvious. In this paper I use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to estimate whether parental smoking causes children to be more likely to take up smoking later in life. I estimate models with rich controls for family smoking behavior. I also estimate IV models that control for the choice of mothers and fathers to smoke. The results suggest that failing to control for the endogenous choice of parents to smoke leads to incorrect inferences.