The Causal Effects of Youth Cigarette Addiction and Education

Rong Hai and James Heckman

Journal of Political Economy, 2026, vol. 134, issue 5, 1347 - 1400

Abstract: We develop and estimate a life-cycle model of addiction in which forward-looking youth choose to smoke, attend school, work part-time, and consume while facing borrowing constraints. The model features multiple channels for studying the reciprocal causal effects of addiction and education. Variations in endowments and cigarette prices are sources of identification. We show that education causally reduces smoking. A counterfactual experiment finds that in the absence of cigarette smoking, college attendance increases by 2 percentage points in the population. An alternative 25% additional excise tax achieves similar results. Impacts vary substantially across persons of different cognitive and noncognitive abilities.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/739828 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/739828 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:jpolec:doi:10.1086/739828

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Political Economy from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().