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IS EMPLOYMENT DISCRIMINATION BASED ON TOBACCO USE EFFICIENT?
Author(s) -
IRVINE IAN,
NGUYEN HAI V.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
contemporary economic policy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.454
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1465-7287
pISSN - 1074-3529
DOI - 10.1111/coep.12044
Subject(s) - demographic economics , medical costs , business , economic cost , duration (music) , variety (cybernetics) , environmental health , demography , economics , actuarial science , medicine , statistics , health care , mathematics , microeconomics , economic growth , art , literature , sociology
Numerous employers in over 20 U.S. states currently discriminate legally against smokers in their hiring policies. We analyze the cost of being a smoker, measured in annual hospital days, and compare this with the cost of being a former smoker, the cost of being obese, and the cost of a variety of other medical conditions, relative to the cost of being a never smoker, using three large recent surveys each having in excess of one hundred thousand observations. The paper also explores the cost of former smokers as determined by the number of years since quitting. Smokers as a whole are not found to be the most costly employees. Furthermore, health costs vary dramatically among smokers of different duration and intensity. As a consequence, our results question the efficiency of such discrimination . ( JEL I10, I18, J71, J7)