Education and Smoking Cessation:

This thesis analyses the relationship between education and smoking cessation. It focuses on the soft skills as an interpretation of the relationship. This thesis tests the theory that education leads to better skills, and those skills are being used for smoking cessation, which has been considered as one of the plausible explanations. Longitudinal data, gathered from a survey among Dutch households, confirms a jointly significant influence of the various educational levels and the likelihood to quit smoking. The association of various soft skills, such as following schedules, is tested for their relationship with education using OLS regressions. To show the effect runs from education to skills, rather than the other way around, the interaction effect of age and being a student on smoking cessation is also tested. To complete the theory the relationship between skills and quitting smoking is tested using a fixed effects regression. The theory could be proven if any of the skills showed significant effects in all regressions, and the causality was significantly positive. This was not the cause for any of the skills however. It was shown that skills were involved in the relationship between education and smoking, but this relationship isn’t a causal one. Also shown was that income was both significantly positively associated with both education and quitting smoking.