The complementarity of teen smoking and drinking

Teen drinkers are over twice as Likely as abstainers to smoke cigarettes. T his empirical study provides evidence of a robust complementarity between t hese health behaviors by exploiting the "cross-price" effects. The results indicate that the movement away from minimum legal drinking ages of 18 redu ced teen smoking participation by 3 to 5%. The corresponding instrumental v ariable estimates suggest that teen drinking roughly doubles the mean proba bility of smoking participation. Similarly, higher cigarette taxes and redu ctions in teen smoking are associated with a lower prevalence of teen drink ing. However, the results which rely on cigarette taxes for identification are estimated imprecisely. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserv ed.