The impact of parents’ health shocks on children’s health behaviors

This paper examines how two smoking-related parental health shocks affect offspring smoking behavior depending on the timing of the health shock. A descriptive analysis restricted to individuals whose parents were diagnosed with lung cancer or another smoking-related cancer suggests different smoking behaviors depending on the age of the individual 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. Doing so, we aim at evaluating the extent to which a parental diagnosis acts as an informational shock and affects offspring behavior by bringing salient information about the health hazards of smoking. We find that receiving a parental diagnosis reduces the long-term probability of being a smoker. This effect is driven by individuals receiving the parental diagnosis at the age when the decision to smoke is about to be made. The informational shock effect associated with lung cancer appears systematically stronger than the informational shock effect associated with other smoking-related cancers.