The effect of education on smoking behavior: new evidence from smoking durations of a sample of twins

This paper analyzes the effect of education on starting and quitting smoking. We use longitudinal data of Australian twins and estimate duration models for smoking and non-smoking durations. Our approach enables us to take account of the endogeneity of education, censoring of smoking durations, and the timing of starting smoking versus that of completion of education.
We find that one additional year of education reduces the duration of smoking with 9 months but has no effect on the decision to start smoking. This finding is robust with respect to different identifying assumptions and seems largely confined to male twins.