Ethnic majority-minority disparities: Differential effects of exposure to secondhand smoke on child development

This study empirically examines the effects of exposure to paternal smoking on child growth, utilizing comprehensive data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey. We use doubly robust estimations to compare the health outcomes of children whose fathers began smoking before pregnancy with children whose fathers abstained from smoking during the same time. We present separate point estimates for children from ethnic minorities and the ethnic majority group to analyze whether smoking is a channel through which the majority-minority gradient in health outcomes is transmitted from one generation to the next. Our findings reveal a significant reduction in the anthropometric height-for-age z-score among children from ethnic minority groups but not from the ethnic majority group, suggesting that smoking is an important conduit for these disparities. We present suggestive evidence that ethnic segregation contributes to the effect heterogeneity of secondhand smoke exposure between the ethnic majority and ethnic minorities. These findings underscore the importance of strengthening tobacco control regulations, such as increasing tobacco taxes and enforcing smoking bans, and point to the need to address ethnic segregation to mitigate the disproportionate impact of second-hand smoke exposure on ethnic minority children.