Cigarette Advertisements and Smoking Cessation
- Presenter:
Chair: Sara Markowitz; Discussant: Hope Corman Mon June 5, 2006 13:45-15:15 Room 335
The academic and policy debate on cigarette advertising has mainly focused on whether cigarette advertising encourages children and adolescents to start smoking. Our econometric approach uses microdata to examine a related but neglected question: Does cigarette advertising maintain the size of the cigarette market by discouraging current smokers from quitting? We use variation in exposure to magazine advertisements as a natural or quasi-experiment to identify the influence of cigarette advertising on smokers’ attempts to quit smoking. Our preliminary results indicate that smokers whose reading habits expose them to more cigarette advertisements are less likely to attempt to quit and to successfully quit. The profits from discouraging cessation appear large enough to explain some, but not all, of the industry’s expenditures on advertising.
