Although product advertising has been widely studied and understood in relation to the consumer’s purchase decision, advertising may also have unintended but important societal and economic consequences. In this paper, we examine a public health outcome — birth rate — associated with...

Disclaimers are widely used by firms to warn customers of dangers and limitations of their products, and are persuasive when the issue is important. We examine the effects of mandatory disclaimers. Speech restrictions conflict with basic economic incentives. Sellers are motivated by profit to...

The government has successfully prosecuted pharmaceutical companies for off-label promotion of drugs, maintaining that such promotion impermissibly undermines the FDA’s pre-market approval process and jeopardizes the public health. In several recent cases, however, pharmaceutical companies...

This article sets forth the argument that college administrators must adopt a more uniform policy about alcohol use. Part I of this article describes college student alcohol use and the efforts made by college administrators to discourage students from binge and underage drinking. Part II...

Labeling and information disclosure to support consumer choice are often proposed as attractive policy alternatives to onerous mandatory business regulation. This article argues that choices available to consumers are constructed and constrained by actors in the chains of production,...

Using panel data for a cross-section of countries, several previous studies estimate the effect of advertising bans on cigarette consumption. These studies suffer from three general problems: (1) structural change in cigarette demand functions; (2) endogeneity of advertising bans; and (3)...

The Australian Parliament has passed legislation compelling tobacco products to be sold in “plain packaging”. This paper reviews this legislation and its likely effects on prices, market structure in the tobacco industry and on smoking behaviour. Industry changes following two previous sets...

It has often been alleged that alcoholic beverage manufacturers disproportionately target their advertising at minors instead of at people over the age of 21. Empirical analysis presented in this article challenges that allegation; alcoholic beverage manufacturers appear to target people of...

This paper presents a synthesis of cigarette advertising elasticities from econometric studies for the U.S. (25 studies) and other countries (13 studies). Summaries are presented for each sample using fixed- and random-effects weighted means and weighted regressions. The weighted regressions...

This paper assesses empirically the relationship between marketing expenditures and sales in the premium car segment in Germany. We employ a new data-set which contains model-specific data on sales (i.e. registrations), restyling activities and marketing expenditures at a monthly basis for the...