Smoking Habits: Like Father, Like Son, Like Mother, Like Daughter?*
| Author | Daniela Vuri,Anna Sanz‐de‐Galdeano,Maria L. Loureiro |
| Published date | 01 December 2010 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0084.2010.00603.x |
| Date | 01 December 2010 |
717
©Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the Department of Economics, University of Oxford, 2010. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
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OXFORD BULLETIN OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS, 72, 6 (2010) 0305-9049
doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0084.2010.00603.x
Smoking Habits: Like Father, Like Son, Like Mother,
Like Daughter?Å
Maria L. Loureiro†, Anna Sanz-de-Galdeano‡ and Daniela Vuri§
†Departamento de Fundamentos da Análise Económica, Universidade de Santiago de Compos-
tela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (e-mail: maria.loureiro@usc.es)
‡Departament d’Economia I d’Història Econòmica, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barce-
lona, Spain (e-mail: anna.sanzdegaldeano@gmail.com)
§Department of Financial Economics and Quantitative Methods, Faculty of Economics, University
of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, Rome, Italy (e-mail: daniela.vuri@uniroma2.it)
Abstract
We use instrumental variable methods to investigate whether the impact of parental smok-
ing habits on their children’s smoking decisions is a causal one. We find suggestive evi-
dence of same-sex role models in two-parent households: mothers play a more crucial
role in determining their daughters’ smoking decisions, whereas fathers’ smoking habits
are primarily imitated by their sons. This same-sex parent–child link is no longer at play
for teenagers living in single-mother households, for whom the influence of their only
cohabiting parent turns out to be predominant independently of gender.
I. Introduction
Youth smoking behaviour is the object of both extensive public policy interest and aca-
demic research. This interest arises owing to two main reasons. First, most smokers start
as youths and youth smoking often translates into adult smoking, with the well-known
consequences on morbidity and mortality.1For example, in the United States, 42% of
current or former adult smokers started before their 16th birthday, and 75% started be-
fore their 19th birthday.2The analogous figures for the United Kingdom are 37% and
75%, respectively.3More importantly, Gruber (2001) and Gruber and Zinman (2000) have
ÅThe authors thank, without implicating, conference and seminar participants at ESPE, ISER and FEDEA,
Vincenzo Atella, Sascha O. Becker, Lorenzo Cappellari, Dimitrios Christelis, L´ıdia Farr´e, Charles Grant, Stephen
Jenkins, Jos´e Mar´ıa Labeaga, Matilde P. Machado and Juli´an Messina for their helpful comments. Daniela Vuri is
also an IZA (Bonn, Germany) Research Fellow and is affiliated to CHILD (Turin, Italy) and CESifo (Munich, Ger-
many). Anna Sanz-de-Galdeano is also an IZA(Bonn, Germany) Research Fellow and is affiliated to the Barcelona
Graduate School of Economics (Barcelona GSE, Barcelona, Spain). She acknowledges financial support from the
Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology grant SEJ2007-62500, the Barcelona GSE Research Network and the
Government of Catalonia.
JEL Classification numbers: I1, C5.
1The WorldBank (1999, ch. 2) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2004), among others, provide
reviews of the health consequences of smoking.
2Gruber and Zinman (2000).
3These figures are based on authors’ calculations using data from the British Household Panel Survey.
718 Bulletin
shown that this intertemporal correlation in smoking behaviour does not merely stem from
intertemporal correlation in unobserved tastes for this activity. Second, as Gruber (2002)
has argued, youths are unlikely to meet the conditions of ‘homo economicus’. Although
it is generally believed that teenagers in industrialized societies are aware that smoking is
hazardous to one’s health,4there is evidence that a high percentage of adolescent smokers
deny the short-term risks of smoking and see no health risks from smoking the ‘very next
cigarette’, failing to consider the addictive properties of tobacco.5In this sense, Chaloupka
(1991) has shown that younger individuals behave more myopically than their older
counterparts. Actually, among high school seniors who smoke, 56% say that they would
not be smoking 5 years later, but only 31% of them have in fact quit 5 years later.6
Traditionally, public policies have mostly relied on the following tools to regulate
smoking: excise taxation, limits on smoking in public places, advertising regulations,
information campaigns and restrictions on youth access to tobacco products.7There is
a substantial amount of literature focusing on the price elasticity of youth smoking that
has not yielded unanimous conclusions. Some studies have lent empirical support to the
notion that youth smoking is price responsive,8whereas others find low or non-existent
price responsiveness among teenagers.9Gruber and Zinman (2000) use several surveys
providing data on smoking for repeated cross-sections of teens and consistently find that
older teens are sensitive to the price of cigarettes whereas younger teens are not. There
is also a small amount of literature which has analysed the impact of other anti-smoking
policies on youth smoking, but there is not much consistent evidence that their effects are
robust.10
To summarize, the literature on both prices and other anti-smoking policies has pro-
duced somewhat mixed results. In this context, it is useful to analyse the causal role played
by other background characteristics of teenagers in determining their smoking behaviour.In
particular, this article focuses on the intergenerational transmission of smoking behaviour,
which is crucial for understanding long-term policy effectiveness. The intergenerational
transmission of smoking habits has been the object of extensive physiological and medi-
cal research. Not surprisingly, the majority of such research reveals that adolescents are
significantly more likely to smoke if their parents smoke.11 However, studies analysing
the link between parental smoking choices and youth smoking behaviour are rare in the
economic literature. One exception is Powell and Chalopuka (2004), who jointly examine
the relevance of parental influences, prices and tobacco control policies on the smoking
4See Viscusi (1992) and Lundborg (2007).
5See Slovic (2000) and World Bank (1999, ch. 3).
6Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2004).
7See Chaloupka and Warner(2000) and Gruber and Zinman (2000) for more detailed reviews and further references
on the effectiveness of such regulations.
8See for instance, Lewit, Coate and Grossman (1981), Chaloupka and Grossman (1996) and Tauras,O’Malley and
Johnston (2001).
9See for instance, Chaloupka (1991), Wasserman et al. (1991), Douglas and Hariharar (1994), DeCicca, Kenkel
and Mathios (2002).
10For example, Chaloupka and Grossman (1996), Chaloupka and Pacula (1998), Gruber and Zinman (2000) and
DeCicca et al. (2002) have not reached unanimous conclusions regarding the impact of youth access restrictions and
clean air regulations on youth smoking.
11See for instance, Ary et al. (1999), Harakeh et al. (2004), Hill et al. (2005), Jackson and Henriksen (1997),
Jackson et al. (1997), Lai, Ho and Lam (2004), Wakefield et al. (2000) and Wen et al. (2005).
©Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the Department of Economics, University of Oxford 2010
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