Gender-Specific Effects of Smoking Cessation on Drinking: Evidence from a Randomized Trial

Abstract

While a substantial body of literature has focused on the correlational evidence between smoking and drinking, few studies have examined the causal effects between them. We estimated the causal effects of smoking cessation on drinking, further analyzing the effects by gender. Using data from the Lung Health Study (LHS), we employed the random assignment of participants to intervention groups as an instrumental variable (IV) and implemented a two-stage least squares (2SLS) model for causal inference. The empirical findings revealed that smoking cessation led to a significant decrease in the likelihood of alcohol use among women by 22.3 percentage points in the long-run (p < .05). By contrast, the effect of smoking cessation on alcohol use was non-significant among men. This underscores the unique and interdependent relationship between smoking and drinking behaviors, especially in women. Our study suggests that policies promoting smoking cessation may contribute to alcohol abstinence in women.