On the Identification of the Effect of Smoking on MortalityValérie Lechene (), Jerome Adda and University College London and IFS No 184, Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Abstract: This paper considers the identification of the effect of tobacco on mortality. If individuals select into smoking according to some unobserved health characteristic, then estimates of the effect of tobacco on health that do not account for this are biased. We show that using information on mortality, morbidity and smoking, it is possible to control for this selection effect and obtain consistent estimates of the effect of smoking on mortality. We implement our method on Swedish data. We show that there is selection into smoking, and considerable dispersion around the average effect, so that health policies that aim at decreasing smoking prevalence and quantities smoked might have less effect in terms of average number of years of life gained than previously estimated. We also empirically show that selection into smoking has increased over the last fifty years with the availability of information on the dangers of smoking, so that future studies comparing smokers and nonsmokers will spuriously reveal a worsening effect of tobacco on health if they fail to control for selection. Keywords: Health; Duration; Smoking; Selection; Mortality; Life Expectancy; Causality (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oxf:wpaper:184 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC. |
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