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Moving Upstream: The Role of Tobacco Clean Air Restrictions on Educational Inequalities in Smoking

Mon, August 13, 4:30 to 6:10pm, Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, Floor: Level 4, Franklin Hall 7

Abstract

Education affords a range of direct and indirect benefits that promote longer and healthier lives, allowing people to avoid health hazards or adopt new behaviors following advances in medicine. We use tobacco clean air policies to examine how policies or interventions that “move upstream” by uniformly affecting everyone influence educational inequalities in health. Theoretically informed considerations suggest competing hypotheses, that upstream health policies either increase or attenuate the association between education and smoking behavior. Our results provide evidence that upstream interventions or policies, such as smoking bans, are particularly effective among young adults with the lowest levels of parental or individual educational attainment. These findings provide important evidence that upstream policy interventions may disrupt persistent educational inequalities in health behaviors, and they help assuage concerns that tobacco clean air policies increase health inequalities by stigmatizing those with the fewest resources.

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