Theatre B, Richard Berry Building
The University of Melbourne
Professor of Statistics,
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
An important application of statistics in recent years has been to address the causal effects of smoking. There is little doubt that there are health risks associated with smoking. However, more general issues concern the causal effects due to the alleged misconduct of the tobacco industry or due to programs designed to curtail tobacco use. To address any such causal question, assumptions must be made. Although some of the issues are well known in the statistical and epidemiological literature, there does not appear to be a unified treatment that provides prescriptive guidance on the estimation of these causal effects with explication of the needed assumptions. A "conduct attributable fraction" is derived, which allows for arbitrary changes in smoking and nonsmoking health-expenditure-related factors in a counterfactual world without the alleged misconduct, and therefore generalizes the traditional "smoking attributable fraction". The formulation presented here, although described for the problem of estimating excess health expenditures due to the alleged misconduct of the tobacco industry, is more general. It can be applied to any outcome, such as mortality, morbidity, or income from excise taxes, as well as to any situation in which consequences due to alleged misconduct (e.g., of two entities, such as the tobacco and the asbestos industries) or due to hypothetical programs (e.g., extra smoking reduction initiatives) are to be estimated.