Is smoking behavior culturally determined? Evidence from British immigrants

•We show that culture determines smoking decisions.•Our measure of culture varies by age, calendar year, and across birth-cohorts.•Our measure is net of any shared variation in smoking patterns across countries.•When life-course data are available, our approach can be applied to other outcomes.

We exploit migration patterns from the UK to Australia and the US to investigate whether a person's decision to smoke is determined by culture. For each country, we use retrospective data to describe individual smoking trajectories over the life-course. For the UK, we use these trajectories to measure culture by cohort and cohort-age, and more accurately relative to the extant literature. Our proxy predicts smoking participation of second-generation British immigrants but not that of non-British immigrants and natives. Researchers can apply our strategy to estimate culture effects on other outcomes when retrospective or longitudinal data are available.