Cigarette smokers earn significantly less than nonsmokers, but the magnitude of the smoking wage gap and the pathways by which it originates are unclear. Proposed mechanisms often focus on spot differences in employee productivity or employer preferences, neglecting the dynamic nature of human capital development and addiction. In this paper, we formulate a dynamic model of young workers as they transition from schooling to the labor market, a period in which the lifetime trajectory of wages is being developed. We estimate the model with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 Cohort, and we simulate the model under counterfactual scenarios that isolate the contemporaneous effects of smoking from dynamic differences in human capital accumulation and occupational selection. Results from our preferred model, which accounts for unobserved heterogeneity in the joint determination of smoking, human capital, labor supply, and wages, suggest that continued heavy smoking in young adulthood results in a wage penalty at age 30 of 15.9% and 15.2% for women and men, respectively. These differences are much smaller than the raw difference in means in wages at age 30. We show that the contemporaneous effect of heavy smoking net of any life-cycle effects explains 62.9% of the female smoking wage gap but only 20.4% of the male smoking wage gap.

吸烟者的收入明显低于不吸烟者，但吸烟者工资差距的大小及其产生途径尚不清楚。提议的机制通常侧重于员工生产力或雇主偏好的局部差异，而忽略了人力资本发展和成瘾的动态性质。在本文中，我们制定了青年工人从学校教育过渡到劳动力市场的动态模型，在这个时期，工资的终生轨迹正在形成。我们使用 1997 年全国青年纵向调查队列的数据估计模型，并在反事实情景下模拟模型，这些情景将吸烟的同期影响与人力资本积累和职业选择的动态差异隔离开来。我们首选模型的结果，考虑到吸烟、人力资本、劳动力供应和工资的联合决定中未观察到的异质性，表明在年轻的成年期持续大量吸烟导致女性和男性在 30 岁时的工资惩罚分别为 15.9% 和 15.2%。这些差异远小于 30 岁时工资平均值的原始差异。我们表明，任何生命周期效应的重度吸烟网的同期效应解释了 62.9% 的女性吸烟工资差距，但仅解释了 20.4% 的男性吸烟工资差距。