As with many other addictions and risk behaviours, smoking initiation is an early affair: most who adopt it at all do so early on during adolescence, rarely beyond their mid-20s. It is known that the cumulative health and mortality effects of smoking take a long time to unfold (Gajalakshmi et...

This paper is the first to provide evidence that cultural attitudes towards gender equality affect behaviors with potentially devastating health consequences, and that they do so differently for male and female teenagers. In particular, we show that descending from more gender-equal societies...

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...

We evaluate one of the most prevalent prohibitory policies: banning the sales of tobacco to teens. We exploit the staggered introduction of sales bans across Switzerland and the European Union from 1990 to 2016. The estimates indicate a less than 1 percentage point reduction in teen smoking...