Cities and Smoking

Michael Darden

No 27334, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: In 1956, 52% of urban men and 42% of rural men smoked cigarettes. By 2010, the disparity had flipped: 24.7% of urban men and 30.6% of rural men smoked. Smoking remains the greatest preventable cause of mortality in the United States, and understanding the underlying causes of place-specific differences in behavior is crucial for policy aimed at reducing regional inequality. Using geocoded data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I estimate a dynamic model that captures smoking behavior, location decisions, and education over thirty years. Simulation of the estimated model demonstrates that selection on permanent unobserved variables that are correlated with smoking cessation, both in native populations and in those who migrate between rural and urban areas, explains 62.8$\%$ of the urban/rural smoking disparity. Alternatively, differential tobacco control policies explain only 7.3% of the urban/rural smoking disparity, which suggests that equalizing cigarette taxes across regions may fail to bridge gaps in behavior and health. This paper emphasizes that rural smoking disparities are largely driven by who selects into rural communities.

JEL-codes: H2 I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ure
Note: EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published as Michael E. Darden, 2021. "Cities and Smoking," Journal of Urban Economics, vol 122.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27334.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27334

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27334

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().