Education and smoking: Were Vietnam war draft avoiders also more likely to avoid smoking?

We use the Vietnam war draft avoidance behavior documented by Card and Lemieux [Card, D., Lemieux, T., May 2001. Did draft avoidance raise college attendance during the Vietnam war? American Economic Review 91 (2), 97–102] as a quasi experiment to infer causation from education to smoking and find strong evidence that education, whether measured in years of completed schooling or in educational attainment categories, reduces the probability of smoking at the time of the interview, more particularly the probability of smoking regularly. However, while we find that more education substantially increases the probability of never smoking, our instrumental procedure yields imprecise estimates of the effect of education on smoking cessation. Potential mechanisms linking education and smoking are also explored.