Taxes, cigarette consumption, and smoking intensity

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Adda, Jerome; Cornaglia, Francesca
• 署名单位: University of London; University College London
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0002-8282
• DOI: 10.1257/aer.96.4.1013
• 发表日期: 2006
• 页码: 1013-1028
• 关键词: SERUM COTININE LEVELS; ETHNIC-DIFFERENCES; racial-differences; nicotine; smokers; TAR

摘要

This paper analyses the compensatory behavior of smokers. Exploiting data on cotinine concentration-a metabolite of nicotine-measured in a large population of smokers over time, we show that smokers compensate for tax hikes by extracting more nicotine per cigarette. Our study makes two important contributions. First, as, smoking a given cigarette more intensively is detrimental to health, our results, question the usefulness of tax increases. Second, we develop a model of rational addiction where agents can also adjust their intensity of smoking, and we show that the previous empirical results suffer from estimation biases.