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Taxes, Cigarette Consumption, and Smoking Intensity: Comment

American Economic Review 2012 102(4), 1751-1763
This paper re-examines Adda and Cornaglia's (2006) evidence on the compensatory behavior of smokers who, in face of higher taxes, are found to reduce their consumption of cigarettes while maintaining their cotinine––a biomarker for nicotine––levels constant. This comment examines the robustness of the empirical findings in Adda and Cornaglia (2006) using: appropriate clustered standard errors, a larger sample from the same years and survey as the data in Adda and Cornaglia (2006), cigarette-prices instead of and in addition to cigarette-taxes, and sampling weights. The empirical findings of Adda and Cornaglia (2006) are not robust. Further, little systematic evidence of compensatory behavior is found among subsamples of smokers