Smoking habits: like father, like son, like mother, like daughter?

We use instrumental variable methods to investigate whether the impact of parental smoking habits on their children’s smoking decisions is a causal one. We find suggestive evidence of same-sex role models in two-parent households: mothers play a more crucial role in determining their daughters’ smoking decisions, whereas fathers’ smoking habits are primarily imitated by their sons. This same-sex parent–child link is no longer at play for teenagers living in single-mother households, for whom the influence of their only cohabiting parent turns out to be predominant independently of gender.