The U.S. 2009 Tobacco Control Act opened the door for new anti-smoking policies by giving the Food and Drug Administration broad regulatory authority over the tobacco industry. We develop a behavioral welfare economics approach to conduct cost-benefit analysis of FDA tobacco regulations. We use...

We conduct an empirical study of the impact of consumer price-search on the shifting of cigarette excise taxes to consumer prices. We use novel data on the prices smokers report actually paying for cigarettes. We document substantial price dispersion. We find that cigarette taxes are shifted at...

In this paper we contribute new empirical results about consumers' decisions to avoid cigarette excise taxes, and a new applied welfare economic analysis of optimal excise taxation with tax avoidance. We examine direct measures of consumer excise tax avoidance in novel individual-level data from...