E-Cigarette Minimum Legal Sale Age Laws and Traditional Cigarette Use among Rural Pregnant Teenagers

Michael Pesko and Janet Currie

No 22792, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Teenagers under the age of 18 could legally purchase e-cigarettes until states passed e-cigarette minimum legal sale age laws. These laws may have curtailed pregnant teenagers ability to use e-cigarettes for smoking cessation and increased prenatal cigarette smoking rates as a result. We investigate the effect of e-cigarette minimum legal sale age laws on prenatal cigarette smoking and birth outcomes for underage rural teenagers using data on all births from 2010 to 2016 from 32 states. We find that e-cigarette minimum legal sale age laws increased prenatal smoking in a given trimester by 0.6 percentage points (pp) overall. These effects were disproportionately concentrated in pre-pregnancy smokers. There was little evidence of the laws having any effect on pre-pregnancy non-smokers, suggesting that ENDS MLSAs increased prenatal smoking rates by reducing cigarette smoking cessation instead of by causing new cigarette smoking initiation. Our results may indicate an unmet need for assistance with smoking cessation among pregnant teenagers.

JEL-codes: I12 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
Note: CH EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published as Michael F. Pesko & Janet M. Currie, 2019. "E-Cigarette Minimum Legal Sale Age Laws and Traditional Cigarette Use among Rural Pregnant Teenagers," Journal of Health Economics, .

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22792.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: E-cigarette minimum legal sale age laws and traditional cigarette use among rural pregnant teenagers (2019)
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:22792

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22792

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 ().