Smoking habits in Mexico: Upward and downward comparisons of economic status

Lucio Esposito,Christopher Millett,Shatakshee Dhongde

doi:10.1111/rode.12774

Abstract

AbstractWhile experimental and behavioral economics have extensively studied the role of both upward and downward comparisons of economic status, the latter have been largely neglected in secondary data studies. The scarce existing evidence shows mixed results and is essentially limited to analyses of subjective well‐being in high‐income countries. Using nationally representative data from Mexico with almost 45,000 personal records, we disentangle the role of absolute wealth, relative deprivation, and relative affluence as explanatory variables for smoking behavior. We find robust evidence of greater smoking at higher levels of absolute achievement and relative deprivation and lower smoking at higher levels of relative affluence. Results hold for a variety of indicators of smoking habits, reflecting both smoking prevalence and intensity. Compared to men, we find that women tend to have stronger associations between the three facets of economic status and smoking prevalence. Results are robust to the use of alternative functional forms and reference groups for the measurement of relative deprivation and relative affluence.

Highlights

While economists have for a long time assumed that individuals are affected by absolute income and not by the incomes of others, over the past three decades a growing body of literature has strongly challenged this assumption
We used the three facets of economic status featuring in the Fehr and Schmidt (1999) framework as explanatory variables for an array of outcome variables related to smoking behavior— for the first time extending the joint study of upward and downward comparisons beyond subjective well-being outcomes
Using a large representative Mexican health survey, we found robust evidence that absolute wealth and relative deprivation are risk factors, while relative affluence is a protective factor for smoking

Summary

| INTRODUCTION

While economists have for a long time assumed that individuals are affected by absolute (i.e., own) income and not by the incomes of others, over the past three decades a growing body of literature has strongly challenged this assumption (for reviews covering the survey-b ased, experimental and theoretical literature, see Clark & D’Ambrosio, 2015; Clark et al, 2008; Esposito, 2018; Verme, 2018). A much smaller number of studies have investigated the three components of economic status in empirical analyses using large secondary data, with the aim of disentangling the specific relationships between each of the three domains of economic status and social outcomes These studies use data mostly from high-income countries and cover only dependent variables such as subjective well-being (e.g., D’Ambrosio & Frick, 2012; Ferrer-i-Carbonell, 2005) and job satisfaction (Lundquist, 2008). We use the three facets of economic status envisaged by the Fehr and Schmidt (1999) framework as explanatory variables in regression analysis This approach has been adopted by Ferrer-i-Carbonell (2005), D’Ambrosio and Frick (2012), Cojocaru (2014), Bárcena-Martín et al (2017), and Leites and Ramos (2018), for whom the dependent variable was subjective well-being, and by Lundquist (2008), who studied job satisfaction.. It should be noted that upward and downward comparisons involve different neural processes (Güroğlu et al, 2014), and that while negative feelings related to upward comparisons are ubiquitous among humans as well as other social species, feelings related to downward comparisons seem to be circumscribed to humans (Brosnan & de Waal, 2014), and within humans they seem to differ across cultures and at different stages of development across childhood (Blake et al, 2015; McAuliffe, Blake, Steinbeis & Warneken 2017)

| Literature on economic status and smoking

| RESULTS

Findings

| CONCLUSION