 The role of tobacco taxes in starting and quitting smoking: Duration analysis of British dataMartin Forster and Andrew Jones Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, 2001, vol. 164, issue 3, 517-547 Abstract: The annual 5% increase in tobacco taxes in real terms proposed in the recent White Paper on smoking has reaffirmed the commitment of successive UK Governments to above‐inflation increases in tobacco taxation to encourage people to stop smoking. This paper presents evidence on the determinants of starting and quitting smoking by using data from the British Health and Lifestyle Survey and is the first to identify tax elasticities for starting and quitting smoking using British data. Self‐reported individual smoking histories are coupled with a long time series for the tax rate on cigarettes to construct a longitudinal data set. Estimates are obtained for the effect of above‐inflation tax rises on the age of starting smoking and the number of years of smoking. The estimates of the tax elasticity of the age of starting smoking are 0.16 for men and 0.08 for women. The estimates of the tax elasticity of quitting are −0.60 for men and −0.46 for women. These are robust to different specifications. Date: 2001 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jorssa:v:164:y:2001:i:3:p:517-547 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A is currently edited by A. Chevalier and L. Sharples More articles in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A from Royal Statistical Society Contact information at EDIRC. |
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