The empirical relationship between community social capital and the demand for cigarettes

We show that the proportion of community social capital attributable to religious groups is inversely and strongly related to the number of cigarettes that smokers consume. We do not find overall community social capital or the proportion of community social capital attributable to religious groups to be related to the overall prevalence of smoking. Using a new validated measure of community social capital, the Petris Social Capital Index and three years (1998-2000) of US data on 39 369 adults, we estimate a two-part demand model incorporating the following controls: community-level fixed effects, price (including excise taxes), family income, a smuggling indicator, nonsmoking regulations, education, marital status, sex, age, and race|ethnicity. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.