Causal Effect of Early Initiation on Adolescent Smoking Patterns

A key concern in policy debates over youth smoking is whether preventing children from smoking will stop them from smoking as adults or merely defer initiation into smoking. This paper estimates smoking status in late adolescence viewing smoking at age 14 as an endogenous "treatment" on subsequent smoking, an approach which disentangles causation from unobserved heterogeneity and allows the model to capture the theoretical prediction that addictiveness varies across individuals. Exploiting large tax changes..