Smokers not only choose the number of cigarettes to smoke in any given period on the basis of price, they also choose the intensity with which to smoke - that is, how much nicotine to inhale. The possibility that quantity-reducing tax policies may be mitigated, or even completely offset, by...

Alchian and Allen's "Third Law of Demand" (1967) states that as a fixed cost increases by the same amount for low - and high-quality goods, the ratio of the prices of high - to low-quality goods will fall and the quantity demanded of high quality goods relative to low quality goods will...

The tobacco industry claims that increases in tobacco tax will not discourage people from smoking because smokers will simply substitute taxed cigarettes with smuggled untaxed cigarettes. The experience in Hong Kong suggests that smuggled cigarettes are eating into some of the taxed cigarette...

Fiscal policies are an especially promising lever for reducing the burden of non-communicable diseases and injuries. On World No Tobacco Day 2014, World Health Organization (WHO) repeated with greater intensity its well-known proposal on raising tobacco taxes to encourage users to stop or reduce...

The literature on the health economics of smoking presents two principal facts: that smoking increases health care costs, and that restrictions on smoking lead to reductions in smoking prevalence and intensity. Some researchers have hypothesized that these two facts, in combination, allow the...