Does Job Loss Make You Smoke and Gain Weight?

Jan Marcus

No 432, SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

Abstract: This paper estimates the effect of involuntary job loss on smoking behavior and body weight using German Socio-Economic Panel Study data. Baseline nonsmokers are more likely to start smoking due to job loss, while smokers do not intensify their smoking. Job loss increases body weight slightly, but significantly. In particular, single individuals as well as those with lower health or socioeconomic status prior to job loss exhibit high rates of smoking initiation. The applied regression-adjusted semiparametric difference-in-difference matching strategy is robust against selection on observables and time-invariant unobservables. This paper provides an indirect test showing that the identifying assumption is not violated in the difference-in-difference estimator. The findings are robust over various matching specifications and different choices of the conditioning variables.

Keywords: Job loss; smoking; body weight; health behavior; difference-in-difference; propensity score matching (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 p.
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.394452.de/diw_sp0432.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Does Job Loss Make You Smoke and Gain Weight? (2014)
Journal Article: Does Job Loss Make You Smoke and Gain Weight? (2014)
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:diw:diwsop:diw_sp432

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().