The empirical literature on economic growth and development has moved from the study of proximate determinants to the analysis of ever deeper, more fundamental factors, rooted in long-term history. A growing body of new empirical work focuses on the measurement and estimation of the effects of...

This paper investigates the short-term effects of public smoking bans on individual smoking behavior. In 2007 and 2008, state-level smoking bans were gradually introduced in all of Germany's federal states. We exploit this variation to identify the effect that smoke-free policies had on...

Empirical studies on the earnings effects of tobacco use have found significant wage penalties attached to smoking. This article produces evidence that suggests that these estimates are significantly upward biased. The bias arises from a general failure in the literature to control for past...

The paper explores weak monotonicity and convexity assumptions in a model for the decision to smoke with endogenous schooling. Theories of productive and allocative efficiency as well as the influence of time preferences are accounted for in order to derive testable constraints that bound the...

This paper examines the effect of job stress on two key health risk-behaviors: smoking and alcohol consumption, using data from the Canadian National Population Health Survey. Findings in the extant literature are inconclusive and are mainly based on standard models which can model differential...

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...

This paper evaluates the effect of excise taxes and bans on smoking in public places on the exposure to tobacco smoke of non-smokers. We use a novel way of quantifying passive smoking: we use data on cotinine concentration- a metabolite of nicotine- measured in a large population of non-smokers...

We consider the misreporting of illicit drug use and juvenile smoking in self-report surveys and its consequences for statistical inference. Panel data containing repeated self-reports of 'lifetime' prevalence give unambiguous evidence of misreporting as 'recanting' of earlier reports of drug...

In this paper, we investigate the intergenerational transmission of smoking behavior from parents to their children using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, surveyed in 1999 including 813 youths aged 16 through 19. We find strong evidence, that parental smoking significantly increases...