美国经济学会论文集(1-3)3

资料简介：

This paper examines the role of body weight in smoking initiation by adolescents. We estimate discrete-time hazard models of the decision to initiate smoking using data from the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 Cohort. We control for cigarette prices, tobacco control policies and socioeconomic factors. To avoid problems stemming fromthe endogeneity of body weight, we also estimate models using the method of instrumental variables.
We find clear gender differences. Lighter girls are less likely to initiate smoking, while
current weight is uncorrelated with initiation among boys. Among girls, smoking initiation is
insensitive to cigarette prices, but among boys smoking initiation is negatively correlated with
cigarette prices. These gender-specific differences may help explain the mixed evidence of theimpact of price on smoking initiation found in previous literature.