Catching the Habit: A Study of Inequality of Opportunity in Smoking-Related Mortality

Abstract

The paper presents a latent factor model for initiation of smoking, cessation and mortality using the British Health and Lifestyle Survey. This allows us to investigate inequality of opportunity in risk of mortality, focusing on the intergenerational transmission of smoking. We find that the hazard of mortality is higher for current and former smokers relative to never smokers. Furthermore we find that parental smoking plays an important role in the dynamics of smoking and indirectly affects mortality. Predictions derived from the model show that inequality in mortality decreases if individuals adopt the best level of effort (not smoking) or if circumstances are favourable (if parents are non-smokers)

A discrete latent factor model for smoking, cancer and mortality

“…The equations in their model are tied together and estimated as a system by allowing for common unobservables that are modelled as discrete latent factors, following the approaches of Heckman and Singer (1984) and Mroz (1999). In line with the epidemiological literature such as Doll et al (2004), Balia and Jones (2011) find a difference of about 12 years in median survival between current and never smokers and about 3.6 years between current and former smokers.…”

“…This extends the approach of Balia and Jones (2011), who estimate similar models, but without cancer registration, for an earlier HALS follow-up. The model adopts a discrete latent factor approach for dealing with the effect of unobserved heterogeneity in systems of equations Heckman and Singer (1984) and Mroz (1999).…”

“…Balia and Jones (2011) developed this approach by estimating a recursive system of equations for starting smoking, the age of starting, the number of years smoked and age of death, with data from the April 2005 deaths follow-up. The equations in their model are tied together and estimated as a system by allowing for common unobservables that are modelled as discrete latent factors, following the approaches of Heckman and Singer (1984) and Mroz (1999).…”

Health opportunities in Colombia

“…At the end, their results suggest that the relative participation of circumstances and effort on health inequalities are very similar regarding their three premises. See also Balia and Jones (2011).…”

Quality of schooling and inequality of opportunity in health

“…Each model adds a set of covariates to the preceding one, in a sequence that reflects the chronological realisation of these channels: as shown by Balia and Jones (2011), lifestyles such as cigarette smoking are likely to be acquired before the attainment of academic qualifications, which, in turn, influence socioeconomic status later in life. For each health outcome, the specifications that account for all these factors are of the form: health outcome i,age46/42 = α + β 1,i * (type and characteristics of school) +β 2,i * (childhood health) + β 3,i * (ability) +β 4,i * (parental background) +β 5,i * (local area/other control variables) +β 6,i * (lifestyles age33/42 ) +β 7,i * (highest edu.…”