Regulatory policies designed to improve societal welfare by “nudging” consumers to make better choices are increasingly popular. The application of benefit-cost analysis (BCA) to this sort of regulation confronts difficult theoretical and applied issues. In this analysis we contribute a...

Many policy makers continue to advocate and adopt cigarette taxes as a public health measure. Most previous individual-level empirical studies of cigarette demand are essentially static analyses of the relationship between the level of taxes and smoking behavior at a point in time. In this...

This paper re-examines the empirical support for predictions that proposed cigarette tax or price increases will substantially reduce youth smoking. Part of the support for these predictions comes from evidence that higher taxes reduce aggregate tobacco sales and adult smoking rates. But taxes...

We analyze data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 on high school completion, smoking, and obesity. First, we investigate whether GED recipients differ from other high school graduates in their smoking and obesity behaviors. Second, we explore whether the relationships between...

This paper reexamines whether higher cigarette taxes will substantially reduce youth smoking. We study the impact of taxes during exactly the period in adolescence in which most smokers start their habits. We find weak or nonexistent tax effects in models of the onset of smoking between eighth...

We study the impact of smoking cessation product advertising. To measure potential exposure, we link survey data on magazine-reading habits and smoking behavior with an archive of print advertisements. We find that smokers who are exposed to more advertising are more likely to attempt to quit...

The large differences in youth smoking behavior across ethnic and racial groups are often overlooked in debates about prevention. This study examines how the determinants of the onset of smoking vary by race and ethnicity. Academic success is strongly associated with lower smoking rates among...

We investigate how direct-to-consumer advertising of smoking cessation products is affected by Food and Drug Administration regulations. Because of their effectiveness, these products could be the key to meeting public health goals to reduce smoking. Our study period covers the evolution of the...

Although the prevalence of smoking has declined among US adults, an estimated 22.5% of the adult population (45.8 million adults) regularly smoked in 2002. Starting from this level, it will not be possible to achieve the Healthy People national health objectives of a reduction in the prevalence...

In this paper, we develop a new direct measure of state anti-smoking sentiment and merge it with micro-data on youth smoking in 1992 and 2000. The empirical results from the cross-sectional models show two consistent patterns: after controlling for differences in state anti-smoking sentiment,...