Working Paper: NBER ID: w9790
Authors: John A. Tauras; Lan Liang
Abstract: Physicians' advice to stop smoking has been found to increase smoking cessation rates in controlled clinical trials. However, these finding may not be applicable under real world conditions. This paper investigates the impact of physicians' advice and tobacco control policies on conditional cigarette demand among adults employing non-experimental data. Because the data is non-experimental, the variable reflect physician advice to stop smoking and cigarette consumption are likely to be endogenous. We implement a three stage least squares regression technique designed to take account the joint determination of physician advice and cigarette smoking. The results from these models imply that smokers that received advice from their physician to quit smoking will decrease their average daily consumption by between 5-6 cigarettes per day as compared to smoker who do not receive advice. This result implies that physicians' advice is effective in curtailing smoking in real world settings. Other policies that were found to decrease average smoking by smokers include: the real price of cigarettes and clean indoor air laws.
Keywords: Cigarette Consumption; Physician Advice; Tobacco Control Policies
JEL Codes: I1
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Physician advice (I11) | Decrease in average daily cigarette consumption (D12) |
| Real price of cigarettes (D41) | Decrease in average daily cigarette consumption (D12) |
| Clean indoor air laws (K32) | Decrease in average daily cigarette consumption (D12) |