With a total population of more than 1.3 billion people where more than 31% of adults smoke, China has become the world's largest producer and consumer of cigarettes. We adopt a life-course perspective to study the economics of smoking behavior in China. We use data from the China Health and...

In this paper, we develop a new direct measure of state anti-smoking sentiment and merge it with micro-data on youth smoking in 1992 and 2000. The empirical results from the cross-sectional models show two consistent patterns: after controlling for differences in state anti-smoking sentiment,...

We conduct an empirical investigation of the impact of prenatal care-giver advice on alcohol consumption by pregnant women. In the design of the model and estimator, we pay particular attention to three aspects of the data. First, a large proportion of pregnant women do not drink at all. To...

Recent waves of major longitudinal surveys in the US and other countries include retrospective questions about the timing of smoking initiation and cessation, creating a potentially important but under-utilized source of information on smoking behavior over the life course. In this paper, we...