The Effect of Serving in Vietnam on Smoking Behavior and other Measures of Health

Men who served in the military during the Vietnam era had access to free or inexpensive cigarettes. We use the Vietnam War draft lottery, which randomly assigned draft numbers based on birth dates, to construct instrumental variable estimates of the effects of service on smoking and other healthrelated measures later in life. We find that serving in the war increased the probability of smoking by 30 percentage points as of 1978-80 (when men in the relevant cohorts were aged 25-30), much more than suggested by naive OLS estimates. This large effect, however, dissipates to being statistically insignificant as of 1997-2003 (when they were 45-53). The results provide new evidence regarding the responsiveness of smoking behavior to reduced prices. The results also suggest a high malleability of smoking behavior over time. The sharp increase in the likelihood of smoking due to service in young adulthood did not persist into middle age.1 ∗University of Michigan, Department of Health Management and Policy †University of Michigan, Department of Economics Funding is gratefully acknowledged from the University of Michigan Tobacco Research Network (UMTRN), which is supported by the American Legacy Foundation. The views expressed in this paper do not reflect the views of the Foundation, Foundation staff, or its