[Seminaire CREM] The impact of parents’ health shocks on children’s health behaviors

The impact of parents’ health shocks on children’s health behaviors co-écrit avec Eva Moreno Galbis et Jérémy Tanguy

In this paper we assess how two smoking-related parental health shocks, the diagnosis of lung cancer and the diagnosis of another smoking-related cancer, affect offspring smoking behavior depending on the timing of the health shock. A descriptive analysis restricted on individuals whose parents were diagnosed with smoking-related cancer indicates different smoking behaviors depending on the individual’s age at diagnosis. We build a retrospective panel and use individual fixed effects to control for the endogeneity of the timing of the diagnosis and to neutralize the intergenerational transmission effect in smoking behaviors. We find that receiving a parental diagnosis at the age when the decision to smoke is about to be made reduces the long-term probability of being a smoker. Moreover, the informational shock effect associated with lung cancer appears systematically stronger than the informational shock effect associated with other smoking-related cancers.