Fetal Exposure to Cigarette Smoking and Adult and Old Age Mortality

• In Event: 1431 - Health and Mortality in Midlife

Abstract

This paper examines the intergenerational effects of smoking, more specifically how exposure to cigarette smoking while in utero influences an individual’s adult and old age health, through mortality risk. A large literature has examined the association between smoking during pregnancy and in infancy or childhood, demonstrating negative effects on various aspects of the fetal growth process, where children of smoking mothers experience a significantly higher risk of being born preterm or small for gestational age. Linking exposure to cigarette smoking during gestation and its consequences for later life health emerge as considerably less studied (see, however, Bengtsson and Nilsson 2018). This paper aims to contribute to this by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to smoking during pregnancy induced through the introduction of state level cigarette taxation in the United States, investigating its effect on adult and old age mortality. The paper will rely on full-count Census data from 1930 and 1940, linked using state-of-the-art methods of probabilistic record linkage to the Social Security Death Master File (SSDMF) and to the NUMIDENT, from which death records are obtained.

Authors

• Jonas Helgertz, University of Minnesota

• Rob Warren, University of Minnesota