U.S. Cigarette Consumption: The Case of Low‐Income Women

Abstract

We use double-hurdle or Cragg models to test whether decisions about smoking participation and consumption levels are separate, endogenous choices. We also estimate several dominance models which assume that standard comer solutions are not applicable. A complete dominance model with independence between the participation and consumption decisions is the preferred specification for our data. The most important variables influencing participation are region, number of children, education, and ethnicity. Region, age, race, ethnicity, and health status most affected consumption levels.

Addiction, social interactions and gender differences in cigarette consumption

“…In previous empirical studies (Blaylock and Blisard, 1992;Yen, 2005b;Garcia and Labeaga, 1996;Yen and Jones, 1996), education level has been found to significantly affect smoking behaviour, with better educated individuals moderating cigarette consumption as they are more aware of the health risks connected with consumption of unhealthy.…”

“…that can be further restricted by assuming independence of the errors ( 0 ρ = ) to obtain the independent double-hurdle model, which has been widely used in empirical analysis of tobacco consumption (Blaylock and Blisard, 1992;Garcia and Labeaga, 1996).…”

“…By imposing 0 ρ = , model (19) reduces to the "Two-part" Model (Blaylock and Blisard, 1992), that corresponds to a probit equation for participation and an OLS of log( ) The main issue related to the inclusion of peer-group effects in the double-hurdle specification is the potential endogeneity of the variables measuring social interactions (Auld, 2005). However, it is not feasible to expand the model to allow them to be simultaneously determined, owing to both data limitations (further instruments would be required) and computational feasibility.…”

“…This dummy variable (which equals 1 if self-rated health status is fair/poor) is constructed on the basis of the standard (excellent/good/fair/poor) scale for self-assessed health reported in the HSHS. As pointed out by Blaylock and Blisard (1992) and Shmueli (1996), current health status is not a good predictor of smoking participation, but may be associates with the decision concerning the level of cigarette consumption. In particular, in our study the health status at the time of cessation is unobserved and relating the "stock" of quitters to their present health is misleading.…”

The demand for alcoholic beverages in Spain

“…Different versions of these models have been used in the last few years (Blundell and Meghir, 1987;Jones, 1989;Blaylock and Blisard, 1992;Gould, 1992;Blisard and Blaylock, 1993;Lin and Milon, 1993;Burton et al, 1994;Yen, 1994;Gao et al, 1995;Yen, 1995;Yen and Su, 1995;Burton et al, 1996;Ramajo, 1996;Su and Yen, 1996;Wang et al, 1996;Yen and Jones, 1997).…”