Excise Tax Avoidance: The Case of State Cigarette Taxes

Philip DeCicca, Donald Kenkel and Feng Liu
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Philip DeCicca

No 15941, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: 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 2003 and 2006 - 2007 Tobacco Use Supplements to the U.S. Current Population Survey. We estimate reduced-form models and a structural endogenous switching regression model. In the structural border-crossing equation, the decision to cross the border depends on the difference between the endogenous home- and border-state prices. The reduced-form and structural results show that the probability of cross-border cigarette purchases responds in predictable ways to the economic incentives created by the distance to the border and state tax differentials. To our knowledge, we are also the first study to extend the formula for optimal Pigouvian corrective taxation to incorporate excise tax avoidance. Taking into account tax avoidance implies the optimal tax is substantially below the simple Pigouvian tax that internalizes external costs. In illustrative calculations for 2003, we find that in 20 states the optimal tax that accounts for tax avoidance is at least 20 percent smaller than the simple Pigouvian tax.

JEL-codes: H21 H26 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe and nep-pub
Note: EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Published as DeCicca, Philip & Kenkel, Donald & Liu, Feng, 2013. "Excise tax avoidance: The case of state cigarette taxes," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 32(6), pages 1130-1141.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15941.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Excise tax avoidance: The case of state cigarette taxes (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:15941

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15941

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().