The Effect of Smoking in Young Adulthood..
A thought provoking paper that I overlooked last year but which has recently come to my attention. Using neat causal techniques without strong identifying assumptions this paper suggests that smoking in young adulthood does not lead to large negative health effects later in life. The paper deals convincingly with obvious issues like mortality and other attenuating factors and although it might be reasonable to have some LATE concerns it remains a striking finding.
1 comment:
Peter - if I read it correctly, smoking early leads to bad health effects as it strongly increases the probability of addiction with later smoking really doing the health damage. Do they really have enough people who did not smoke early in life but then began smoking in middle-age to separate out the cumulative effects? Also, the paper cannot really assess the overall life time damage as the population studied is still too young.
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