Tobacco regulation has been a major component of health policy in the developed world since the UK Royal College of Physicians' and the US Surgeon General's reports in the 1960s. Such regulation, which has intensified in the past two decades, includes cigarette taxation, place-based smoking bans in areas ranging from bars and restaurants to workplaces, and regulations designed to make tobacco products less desirable. More recently, the availability of alternative products, most notably e-cigarettes, has increased dramatically, and these products are just starting to be regulated. Despite an extensive body of research on tobacco regulations, there remains substantial debate regarding their effectiveness, and ultimately, their impact on economic welfare. We provide the first comprehensive review of the state of research in the economics of tobacco regulation in two decades.

To shed new light on the role private profit incentives play in promoting public health, in this paper we conduct an empirical study of the impact of pharmaceutical industry advertising on smoking cessation decisions. We link survey data on individual smokers with an archive of magazine advertisements. The rich survey data allow us to measure smokers' exposure to smoking cessation advertisements based on their magazine-reading habits. Because we observe the same information about the consumers that the advertisers observe, we can control for the potential endogeneity of advertising due to firms' targeting decisions. We find that when smokers are exposed to more advertising, they are more likely to attempt to quit and are more likely to have successfully quit.