Anti-smoking policies and smoker well-being: evidence from Britain.

Abstract

Anti-smoking policies can in theory make smokers better o, by helping smokers with time-inconsistent preferences commit to giving up or reducing the amount they smoke. We use almost 20 years of British individual-level panel data to explore the impact on self-reported psychological well-being of two policy interventions: large real-terms increases in tobacco excise taxes and bans on smoking in public places.We use a dierence-in-dierences approach to compare the eects on well-being for smokers and nonsmokers. Smoking behaviour is likely to be inuenced by policy interventions, leading to a selection problem if outcomes are compared across current smokers and non-smokers. We consider dierent ways of grouping individuals into`treatment'and`control' groups based on demographic characteristics and observed smoking histories. We nd fairly robust evidence that increases in tobacco taxes raise the relative well-being of likely smokers. Exploiting regional variation in the timing of the smoking ban across British regions, we also nd some evidence that it raised smoker well-being, though the eect is not robust to the measure of well-being. The economic signicance of the eects also appears to be quite modest. Our ndings therefore give cautious support to the view that such interventions are at least partly justiable because of the benets they have for smokers themselves.JEL: D03, D12, H23, H31

Smoking behaviour and individual well-being: a fresh look at the effects of the 2005 public smoking ban in Italy

“…2010). A recent literature also argues that there could be positive effects of a smoking ban on smokers when the ban acts as a self-control device and individuals are time inconsistent (Odermatt and Stutzer, 2015;Leicester and Levell, 2016). Our results show that the ban had a positive effect on the well-being of the population of non-smokers, and that these effects are felt by many different subgroups of the population.…”

“…Support for this hypothesis can be found in Gruber and Mullainathan (2005), who show that higher taxes improve self-reported well-being of individuals with a higher propensity to smoke compared with those with a lower propensity to smoke. By contrast, Leicester and Levell (2016) show no significant association between smoking bans and individual well-being in the UK. Odermatt and Stutzer (2015) find that smoking bans in Europe are welfare enhancing only for individuals who would like to quit smoking.…”

The impact of public smoking bans on well‐being externalities: Evidence from a policy experiment

“…Cheng et al, 2015) and the use of anti-smoking policies as self-control devices (e.g. Leicester and Levell, 2016). Overall, further research and larger datasets might be needed to more precisely establish the causal pathways leading to the observed increase in well-being following public smoking bans.…”

“…Hinks and Katsaros () employed UK data and found that smokers who reduce their intake of cigarettes after the ban report significantly lower levels of life satisfaction if compared to individuals who did not reduce their amount of tobacco intake (and smoked the same pre‐ban amount of cigarettes). Leicester and Levell () also exploited UK data and found that while tobacco excise taxes increase smokers’ well‐being, the impact of smoking bans appears to be weaker. Overall, these papers tend to overlook potential intra‐household well‐being externalities and appear to present conflicting results .…”

The Welfare Implications of Addictive Substances: A Longitudinal Study of Life Satisfaction of Drug Users

“…This is the case even when many of these smokers did not report to be in favour of the implementation of the smoking ban in the first place. Using twenty years of the British Household Panel Survey, Leicester and Levell (2016) show that increases in cigarette prices raise the happiness of likely smokers. However, the authors find no evidence that the introduction of a smoking ban across the U.K.…”