Boosting taxes on cigarettes will have a far less dramatic effect on rates of teen-age smoking than politicians are hoping, a new Cornell University study finds. Some researchers have estimated this tax increase would reduce the number by as much as half. The study was carried out by Don Kenkel and Alan Mathios, both economists and associate professors in policy analysis and management in Cornell's College of Human Ecology, and Phil Decicca, a graduate student in their department. Although smoking has dropped to 25 percent of U.S. adults from 40 percent since 1964, teen-age smoking has been rising since 1990.
Higher taxes reduce adult smoking by encouraging current smokers to cut down or quit.
The researchers' findings were at variance with previous studies that have found that price hikes do in fact curb teen-age smoking. However, says Mathios, most of these studies attempted to analyze how youth smoking rates were affected by differences in cigarette taxes from state to state. For example, the tobacco-producing states have the lowest tax rates. Our data allowed us to directly examine the impact of changes in tax rates on youth smoking behavior and our results indicate this impact is small or nonexistent. The Cornell researchers found that when they looked at the original 1988 national survey data they found that higher taxes were indeed linked to lower teen-age smoking rates.