Sorting into Secondary Education and Peer Effects in Youth Smoking

Filip Pertold

CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague

Abstract: The start of daily smoking is often shortly after the resorting of students between elementary and secondary education. This paper employs a novel identification strategy based on this resorting, in order to estimate peer effects in youth smoking. We address the reflection problem by peers’ pre-secondary-school smoking, which is not influenced by the current social interaction of classmates. The self-selection of students into secondary schools, based on their unobserved preferences toward smoking, is controlled for using own pre-secondary school behavior and the existing prevalence of smoking among older schoolmates. The empirical findings based on data from the Czech Republic, where the prevalence of youth smoking prevalence reached high levels, suggest that male youth smoking is significantly affected by classmates, while female smoking is not.

Keywords: Peer effects; smoking; sorting. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D1 I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-lab and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cer:papers:wp399

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