Résumé
How can individuals who have experienced a shock in their addictive consumption trajectories return to their habitual use? As part of a behavioral economics online survey conducted on a representative sample of the French population, we asked respondents to retrospectively quantify their consumption of tobacco, alcohol, and recreational screen use at three moments: before, during, and after the first Covid-19 lockdown. Using a methodology that controls for inter-individual heterogeneity, we test for the presence of a hysteresis effect, i.e. whether the shocks in use that occurred during the lockdown last beyond the end of it and the return to a more normal life. We find persistent hysteresis for the three addictive goods. Studying this hysteresis effect in relation to time preferences, we find that, for tobacco, present-biased individuals exhibit more hysteresis. This hysteresis insight, related to time preferences, offers valuable perspectives for addiction research and policy design addressing population resilience to shocks.