Abstract:
This work investigates the effect of smoking on wages for male workers using panel data from Britain for the period of 1991-2005. The strong negative correlation of smoking and wages found in a crosssectional analysis reduces substantially when accounting for unobserved individual heterogeneity using Fixed Effects estimation. I find a statistically significant wage penalty that is causally due to smoking of about -2% for smokers over those who quit. Further analysis indicates, however, that the negative effect might be underestimated when comparing with those who never started smoking or quit a long time ago.
