Recipients of PSC Small Grant Awards

My dissertation consists of three papers that investigate how and why cigarette smoking became socioeconomically stratified in the United States. In the first paper, I use smokers’ life histories collected by the National Health Interview Survey and build discrete time hazard models that estimate individuals’ risks of initiation and cessation by their birth cohorts. I then evaluate how the risk of initiation and cessation was influenced by socioeconomic status in different periods of the twentieth century.

In my second paper, I take advantage of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and examine the dynamics of within-family transmission of cigarette smoking, paying special attention to the role intergenerational transmission played in maintaining the socioeconomic stratification of smoking across generations. In the second part of this project, I build on my findings by constructing a discreet dynamic model that projects the expected future rates of intergenerational transmission of smoking by socioeconomic status.

The final paper in my dissertation evaluates if, and to what extent, have local smokefree policies shaped the socioeconomic distribution of smoking in the American population. In order to answer this question, I use smokefree law database collected by the Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights and use geospatial regression modelling techniques. Taken together, my research promises to make both theoretical and empirical contributions to the ongoing debate about the origin and persistence of health disparities.

Funding Source: Marshall Weinberg Research Fellowship