According to recent figures from the Department of Health, by the age of 15 around 18% of girls and 26% of boys in England will be regular smokers, despite the legal age for cigarette purchase being 16 years. The impact of regular smoking on health and life expectancy is well-known, and so the factors which influence the decision of young people to smoke or otherwise is of considerable interest. This project aims to explore the extent to which parental income affects smoking behaviour amongst children.

Using data from the relatively unexploited Youth Panel of the British Household Panel Survey between 1994 and 2001, we look at the relationship between parent's income and the smoking status of the children interviewed in the survey. To address the concern that there may be some unobservable fixed effect of particular families which makes some children more or less inclined to smoke than others, we look at differences between siblings - in effect assessing how far changes in parental income drive changes in the smoking behaviour of siblings, after controlling for a variety of other factors.