The impact of parents’ health shocks on children’s health behaviors

Le Lemma organise un séminaire, sur le thème « The impact of parents’ health shocks on children’s health behaviors » le mardi 11 avril 2023 à 11h. 

Sylvie BLASCO (Université du Mans)

Résumé : 

Recent literature has failed to provide significant impact of health events of social contacts on the individual smoking behavior. In this paper we assess how two smoking-related parental health shocks, lung cancer and other smoking-related cancer diagnosis, affect the offspring smoking behavior depending on the timing of the health shock. We use two strategies to isolate the informational shock effect from the transmission effect. We first focus on individuals with parents having received a smoking-related cancer diagnosis and exploit heterogeneity in the age of the individual at the moment of the diagnosis. We then build a retrospective panel and use individual fixed effects to absorb the transmission effect. We find that receiving a parental diagnosis at the age at which the decision to smoke is about to be made reduces the long term probability of being a smoker and duration spells. Our results bring information about the anti-smoking public health policy. They confirm that interventions at the time of smoking initiation are crucial, as well as the importance of finding a better way to communicate about the risks of smoking at younger ages.

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