Many public health groups also support increasing cigarette prices the old-fashioned way-by raising state and federal excise taxes. The American Public Health Association recently adopted a policy statement favoring legislation to "substantially and repeatedly raise the tax on cigarettes" (American Public Health Association 1999, p. 435). The Healthy People 2010 objectives for the nation call for the average federal and state tax on cigarettes to be more than doubled to $2.00 per pack (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2000a). Reliance on higher prices as a way to discourage youth smoking has widespread support among researchers as well. In an interview on National Public Radio (September 29, 1997), Kenneth E. Warner concluded that "among people who have studied various policy measures to influence tobacco consumption, there would be nearly universal agreement that price is the single most important policy lever we can pull to influence youth smoking." During the debate on the proposed national tobacco settlement, policy analysts at the U.S. Treasury Department (1998, p. 14) suggested that "a consensus view is that for every ten percent rise in price, at today's prices, seven percent fewer youths will smoke," that is, that the price elasticity of participation in youth smoking is around Ϫ0.7. The suggested consensus for the price elasticity of participation in youth smoking is in line with several other reviews (

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We study the impact of smoking cessation product advertising. To measure potential exposure, we link survey data on magazine-reading habits and smoking behavior with an archive of print advertisements. We find that smokers who are exposed to more advertising are more likely to attempt to quit and to successfully quit. While some increased quitting involves product purchases, we find that product advertisements also prompt cold turkey quitting. Identifying the causal impact of advertising is difficult because advertisers target consumers. Although reverse causality could bias our estimates upward, our baseline results are not sensitive to a series of checks.

We analyze data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 to explore the relationships between high school completion and the two leading preventable causes of death -smoking and obesity. We focus on three issues that have received a great deal of attention in research on the pecuniary returns to schooling. First, we investigate whether GED recipients differ from other high school graduates in their smoking and obesity behaviors. Second, we explore the extent to which the relationships between schooling and these health-related behaviors are sensitive to controlling for family background measures and cognitive ability. Third, we estimate instrumental variables (IV) models of the impact of schooling on smoking and obesity. Although our IV estimates are imprecise, both the OLS and IV results tend to suggest that the returns to high school completion include a reduction in smoking. We find little evidence that high school completion is associated with a lower probability of being overweight or obese for either men or women. The results also suggest that the health returns to GED receipt are much smaller than the returns to high school completion.