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 smokers report actually paying for cigarettes. We document substantial price dispersion. We find that cigarette taxes are shifted at...

Policy makers continue to advocate and adopt cigarette taxes as a public health measure. Most previous individual-level empirical studies of cigarette demand are essentially static analyses. In this study, we use longitudinal data to examine the dynamics of young adults' decisions about smoking...

In this paper, we develop a new direct measure of state anti-smoking sentiment and merge it with micro data on youth smoking in 1992 and 2000. The empirical results from the cross-sectional models show two consistent patterns: after controlling for differences in state anti-smoking sentiment,...

In this paper we contribute new empirical results about consumers' decisions to avoid cigarette excise taxes, and a new applied welfare economic analysis of optimal excise taxation with tax avoidance. We examine direct measures of consumer excise tax avoidance in novel individual-level data from...

The special legal status of Indian tribes in the U.S. means that state excise taxes are not necessarily collected on cigarette purchases on Indian reservations. We focus on two under-studied but basic empirical economic questions this raises. Using novel data from New York surveys that asked...