Wehby George L, Fletcher Jason M, Lehrer Steven F, Moreno Lina M, Murray Jeffrey C, Wilcox Allen, Lie Rolv T
Department of Health Management and Policy, College of Public Health, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA.
Biodemography Soc Biol. 2011;57(1):3-32. doi: 10.1080/19485565.2011.564468.
There is a large literature showing the detrimental effects of prenatal smoking on birth and childhood health outcomes. It is somewhat unclear though, whether these effects are causal or reflect other characteristics and choices by mothers who choose to smoke that may also affect child health outcomes or biased reporting of smoking. In this paper we use genetic markers that predict smoking behaviors as instruments to address the endogeneity of smoking choices in the production of birth and childhood health outcomes. Our results indicate that prenatal smoking produces more dramatic declines in birth weight than estimates that ignore the endogeneity of prenatal smoking, which is consistent with previous studies with non-genetic instruments. We use data from two distinct samples from Norway and the United States with different measured instruments and find nearly identical results. The study provides a novel application that can be extended to study several behavioral impacts on health and social and economic outcomes.
有大量文献表明产前吸烟对出生及儿童健康状况有不利影响。不过，这些影响是因果关系，还是反映了选择吸烟的母亲的其他特征和选择（这些特征和选择也可能影响儿童健康状况），或者是吸烟报告存在偏差，目前尚不完全清楚。在本文中，我们使用预测吸烟行为的基因标记作为工具，来解决出生及儿童健康状况产生过程中吸烟选择的内生性问题。我们的结果表明，与忽略产前吸烟内生性的估计相比，产前吸烟会使出生体重出现更显著的下降，这与之前使用非基因工具的研究结果一致。我们使用来自挪威和美国的两个不同样本的数据，这些样本有不同的测量工具，且得出了几乎相同的结果。这项研究提供了一种新颖的应用，可扩展用于研究多种行为对健康以及社会和经济成果的影响。
