TY - JOUR
T1 - How different are smokers? An analysis based on personal finances
AU - Adams, Scott
AU - Bose, Niloy
AU - Rustichini, Aldo
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2014/11
Y1 - 2014/11
N2 - We study the association between smoking status and individual decisions, focusing on outcomes in the domain of personal finance. The study draws information on demographic variables, various financial outcomes including individual credit scores, time and risk preferences, and personality traits, from both population data and experimental data. The results suggest that smokers make poor decisions and experience worse outcomes with personal finances vis-à-vis non-smokers. This relationship is robust to controlling for a myriad of variables, including characteristics that are known to be correlated with smoking. Thus, smoking status contains more precise information about individuals that are not fully captured by available noisy economic and psychological measures. Since available estimates of personality traits have substantial measurement error, smoking status may effectively capture residual information.
AB - We study the association between smoking status and individual decisions, focusing on outcomes in the domain of personal finance. The study draws information on demographic variables, various financial outcomes including individual credit scores, time and risk preferences, and personality traits, from both population data and experimental data. The results suggest that smokers make poor decisions and experience worse outcomes with personal finances vis-à-vis non-smokers. This relationship is robust to controlling for a myriad of variables, including characteristics that are known to be correlated with smoking. Thus, smoking status contains more precise information about individuals that are not fully captured by available noisy economic and psychological measures. Since available estimates of personality traits have substantial measurement error, smoking status may effectively capture residual information.
KW - Personal finance
KW - Smoking
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U2 - 10.1016/j.jebo.2014.08.003
DO - 10.1016/j.jebo.2014.08.003
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84907698903
SN - 0167-2681
VL - 107
SP - 40
EP - 50
JO - Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
JF - Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
IS - PA
ER -