Risky Lifestyle Choices of Women with Breast Cancer ChloØ Michel, Michelle Sovinsky, and Steven Stern 1 April 6, 2020 Abstract: Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics on breast cancer diagnosis and lifestyle choices, we estimate how being diagnosed inuences smoking, drinking, and exercising habits for more than 8; 000 women over the period 1999 to 2011. Controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, persistence in potentially addictive behaviors, and correlation across behaviors, we nd that the impact of a diagnosis has a di/erent e/ect on smoking, drinking, and exercising behavior. Furthermore, the impact depends upon the recency of the diagnosis. Recently diagnosed women exercise and smoke less but do not change their drinking habits relative to healthy women. Our approach provides insight into what extent women who are faced with negative information about life expectancy take this into consideration when deciding to engage in risky behaviors that might further a/ect their survival in a signicant way. Keywords: breast cancer, risky health behavior, health economics JEL Codes: I12, J16, C35 1 Michel is at Swiss Re; Sovinsky is at the University of Mannheim and CEPR; Stern is at Stony Brook University. Corresponding author is Sovinsky (University of Mannheim, Department of Economics, L7, 3-5 68161 Mannheim, Germany; msovinsky@econ.uni-mannheim.de).We thank Janet Currie and Michael Darden for helpful comments. We gratefully acknowledge support from the Swiss National Science Foundation Grant #130333. The collection of data used in this study was partly supported by the National Institutes of Health under grant number R01 HD069609 and the National Science Foundation under award number 1157698. Sovinsky acknowledges support from the European Research Council Grant #725081 FORENSICS and from the CRC Transregio Grant 224.