Publications [#138923] of Philip J. Cook

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Journal Articles

  1. C. Carpenter and P.J. Cook. "Cigarette taxes and youth smoking: New evidence from national, state, and local Youth Risk Behavior Surveys." Journal of Health Economics 27 (2008): 287-299.
    (last updated on 2008/04/29)

    Abstract:
    but not all – finding that higher taxes reduce youth consumption of tobacco. We advance the literature by using data from the 11 1991 to 2005 waves of the national Youth Risk Behavior Surveys (YRBS), providing information on over 100,000 high school 12 age youths. We also are the first to make use of hundreds of independently fielded state and local versions of the YRBS, reflecting 13 data from over 750,000 youths. Importantly, these data are to our knowledge the only sources of relevant information on youth 14 smoking that were explicitly designed to be representative of the sampled state or locality.We estimate two-way fixed effects models 15 of the effect of state cigarette taxes on youth smoking, controlling for survey demographics and area and year fixed effects. Our 16 most consistent finding is that – contrary to some recent research – the large state tobacco tax increases of the past 15 years were 17 associated with significant reductions in smoking participation and frequent smoking by youths. Our price elasticity estimates for 18 smoking participation by high school youths are generally smaller than previous cross-sectional approaches but are similar to recent 19 quasi-experimental estimates. 20 © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 21 Keywords: Cigarette tax; Tobacco control; Smoking; Youth substance use 22 22 1. Introduction 23 Is youth smoking price sensitive? Conventional wisdom in research and policy circles is that, indeed, the smoking 24 behaviors of youths and young adults are highly sensitive to price, more so than for adults who as a group may have 25 better established habits. In fact, this reasoning has been explicitly voiced as a motivation for numerous recently 26 proposed and adopted state cigarette tax increases, which have become much larger in magnitude over the past decade 27 (Fig. 1). Despite this conventional wisdom, however, a series of recent studies in the economics literature has called into 28 question whether higher cigarette taxes will “put out the fires” from youth smoking. Using panel data on youths from 29 the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS), DeCicca et al. (2002) find that once time-invariant state fixed Q4 effects are accounted for, youth smoking initiation is statistically unrelated to cigarette taxes. More recently, DeCicca 30 31 et al. (2004, 2006) argue that the strong negative cross-sectional association between cigarette taxes and youth smoking

Philip J. Cook