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We evaluate whether parents' health shocks in early childhood, adolescence or adulthood impact their children's risky health behavior. We use a French epidemiological cohort. Two types of health shocks are considered: lung cancer and smoking-related cancer. First, we exploit heterogeneity in the age of the individual at the moment of the parent's health shock to analyze the influence of the cancer diagnosis on the offspring smoking behavior. Second, we propose a Cox proportional hazards model to study the impact of the age of the offspring at the date of the diagnosis on the probability of quitting smoking. Finally, we use the individual smoking history to build a retrospective panel and estimate an individual fixed effects model to identify the impact of the parent's diagnosis on the probability of smoking.
