Do smokers respond to health shocks?
Abstract
This paper reports the first effort to use data to evaluate how new information, acquired
through exogenous health shocks, affects people's longevity expectations. We find
that smokers react differently to health shocks than do those who quit smoking or
never smoked. These differences, together with insights from qualitative research
conducted along with the statistical analysis, suggest specific changes in the health
warnings used to reduce smoking. Our specific focus is on how current smokers responded
to health information in comparison to former smokers and nonsmokers. The three groups
use significantly different updating rules to revise their assessments about longevity.
The most significant finding of our study documents that smokers differ from persons
who do not smoke in how information influences their personal longevity expectations.
When smokers experience smoking-related health shocks, they interpret this information
as reducing their chances of living to age 75 or more. Our estimated models imply
smokers update their longevity expec-tations more dramatically than either former
smokers or those who never smoked. Smokers are thus assigning a larger risk equivalent
to these shocks. They do not react comparably to general health shocks, implying that
specific information about smoking-related health events is most likely to cause them
to update beliefs. It remains to be evaluated whether messages can be designed that
focus on the link between smoking and health outcomes in ways that will have comparable
effects on smokers' risk perceptions.
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/2127Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1162/003465301753237759Publication Info
Smith, VK; Taylor, DH; Sloan, FA; Johnson, FR; & Desvousges, WH (2001). Do smokers respond to health shocks?. Review of Economics and Statistics, 83(4). pp. 675-687. 10.1162/003465301753237759. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/2127.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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F. Reed Johnson
Professor in Population Health Sciences
F. Reed Johnson, PhD, has more than 40 years of academic and research experience in
health and environmental economics. He has served on the faculties of several universities
in the United States, Canada, and Sweden, and as Distinguished Fellow at Research
Triangle Institute. He currently is Senior Research Scholar in the Duke Clinical Research
Institute. As a staff member in the US Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental
economics research program during the 1980s, Reed helped
Frank A. Sloan
J. Alexander McMahon Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Health Policy and Management
Professor Sloan is interested in studying the subjects of health policy and the economics
of aging, hospitals, health, pharmaceuticals, and substance abuse. He has received
funding from numerous research grants that he earned for studies of which he was the
principal investigator. His most recent grants were awarded by the Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation, the Center for Disease Control, the Pew Charitable Trust, and the National
Institute on Aging. Titles of his projects include, “Why Mature S
Donald H. Taylor Jr.
Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy
Don Taylor is a health policy scholar who has studied rural health, identification
of underserved areas, and the economics of smoking and cessation. For the past 20
years his work has focused on how society cares for the elderly and to what effect
on individuals, families, public programs and inter-generational wealth. More recently
he has focused on archival research methods that help to illustrate the role of Race
in our history—individual, institutional, national. An emerging interest i
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