Smoking Peer Effects among Adolescents: Are Popular Teens More Influential?

Juan David Robalino (jdrobalino@usfq.edu.ec)
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Juan David Robalino: Universidad San Francisco de Quito

No 9714, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In this paper I analyze adolescent peer effects on cigarette consumption while considering the 'popularity' of peers. The analysis is based on AddHealth data, a four wave panel survey representative of American high-school students. The data include the social network of each school, which we use to measure peers' popularity from network centrality measures, in particular weighted-eigenvector centrality. We use lagged peers' behavior at the grade level to alleviate potential homophilic confounds, and we include school fixed effects to control for contextual confounds. We find that most of the aggregate peer effects regarding cigarette smoking come from the smoking propensity of the 20% most popular kids, suggesting a mediation from social status. This effect persists seven and thirteen years later (wave 3 and 4 of the data). Indeed, the smoking propensity of the bottom 80% seems to have a negative influence on the probability of smoking in the long run (wave 3 and 4). These results hint to the importance of knowing not only the smoking propensity within a school but also the place of the smokers within the social hierarchy of the school.

Keywords: peer effects; status (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2016-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-net, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published - published in: PLoS One, 2018, 13 (7), e0189360.

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