Smoke gets in your shape: The effects of smoking on body weight in Indonesia

Literature has shown inconclusive evidence regarding the relationship between smoking and body weight. Utilising panel data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) 1993–2014, this study sets out to re-investigate this relationship in Indonesia—a country with the world’s highest male smoking rate. We estimate the impacts of current and former smoking behaviours on BMI by addressing the endogeneity issues using fixed effects instrumental variables (FEIV) and fixed effects (FE) methods, respectively. We find no causal contemporaneous impact of smoking and smoking intensity on male and female BMI, however, we find that quitting smoking has positive but small effects on male BMI, and the magnitude of the effect is positively related to the previous smoking intensity, the duration of smoking, and the duration since quitting.