Life-course Smoking Behavior: Patterns and National Context in Ten Countries

Despite efforts to curb tobacco use, global tobacco addiction remains as strong as ever. Smoking rates are declining very slowly in advanced countries, and they are increasing in the developing world. Yet, researchers still do not fully understand what drives smoking decisions.

Life-Course Smoking Behavior presents smoking trajectories of different generations of women and men from ten of the world's most visible countries, with nation-specific representative samples spanning more than eighty years of recent history. To inspire hypotheses on the determinants of smoking behavior, the authors place these data in economic, political, social, and cultural contexts, which differ greatly both across countries at a particular time and over time in a given country.

Though significant research has been conducted on smoking statistics and tobacco control policies, most descriptions of smoking behavior rely on cross-sectional "snapshot" data that do not track individuals' habits throughout their lifespan. Lillard and Christopoulou's work is a unique and necessary text in its comparative life-course approach, making it a long overdue complement to the existing literature.

Dean R. Lillard, PhD, is a labor economist in the Department of Human Sciences at Ohio State University and Director of the Cross-National Equivalent File project. He has published articles on health economics in leading scholarly journals including the Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Labor Economics, Statistics in Medicine, and Social Science and Medicine. His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation.

Rebekka Christopoulou, PhD, is a labor economist in the Economics Department of the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece. She has presented her work extensively at academic conferences, and has published her research in edited books and scholarly journals, including Preventive Medicine, the International Journal of Public Health, and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.