On 1 October 2002, the State of Alaska increased taxes on malt beverages from $0.35 per gallon to $1.07 per gallon, increased taxes on wine from $0.85 per gallon to $2.50 per gallon, and increased taxes on distilled spirits from $5.60 per gallon to $12.80 per gallon. The net effect is that the tax on a standard serving rose from about 3 cents for beer, 2 cents for wine, and 4 cents for spirits to a uniform tax of 10 cents per standard serving of each type of alcohol beverage. This paper uses primary data on alcoholic beverage prices in Alaska to study a very basic question: What was the impact of the tax hikes on prices? An alcohol tax hike is often viewed as a public health policy tool to discourage excessive alcohol consumption and alcohol-related problems such as drunk driving. The impact of a tax hike on alcoholic beverage prices is a key link in the chain of the causality from the tax to public health. Economic theory and previous empirical studies, mainly of taxes on goods other than alcoholic beverages, do not provide very much guidance on what to expect following a tax hike. It is an empirical question. To answer the question, I conducted telephone surveys, just before and a year after the tax hike, of on-premise and off-premise alcohol retail establishments across Alaska.

The positive correlation between schooling and good health is well documented. One explanation is that schooling helps people choose healthier life-styles by improving their knowledge of the relationships between health behaviors and health outcomes. That is, schooling improves the household's allocative efficiency in producing health. This empirical study uses direct measures of health knowledge to test this explanation. Part of the relationship between schooling and the consumption of cigarettes, alcohol, and exercise is explained by differences in health knowledge. However, most of schooling's effects on health behavior remain after differences in knowledge are controlled for. Copyright 1991 by University of Chicago Press.

The positive correlation between schooling and good health is well documented. One explanation is that schooling helps people choose healthier life-styles by improving their knowledge of the relationship between health behaviors and health outcomes. That is, schooling improves the household's allocative efficiency in producing health. This empirical study uses direct measures of health knowledge to test this explanation. Part of the relationship between schooling and the consumption of cigarettes, alcohol, and exercise is explained by differences in health knowledge. However, most of schooling's effects on health behavior remain after differences in knowledge are controlled for.

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.

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 schooling and these health‐related behaviors are sensitive to controlling for background and ability measures. Third, we estimate instrumental variables models. Our results suggest that the returns to high school completion may include less smoking but the health returns to GED receipt are much smaller. We find little evidence that high school completion is associated with less obesity.

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 that smokers report paying and document substantial price dispersion. We find that cigarette taxes are shifted at lower rates to carton buyers and, especially, smokers who buy cartons of cigarettes in a state other than their state of residence. We also find evidence that taxes are shifted at somewhat lower rates to the prices paid by heavier smokers and at somewhat higher rates to the prices paid by smokers of light cigarettes.

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 and twelfth grades, models of the onset of heavy smoking between eighth and twelfth grades, and discrete‐time hazard models that include state fixed effects. We also provide a new perspective on the relationship between smoking and schooling: students who eventually drop out of school are already more likely to smoke in the eighth grade.

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.