Cigarette prices and subjective well-being
We’ve written a lot previously about cigarette taxes as a precommitment device that can increase welfare. However, while those models fit the stylised facts, it’s hard to know for sure if people are better off. For that you’d need to make a prediction about their increase in subjective wellbeing and test it. Now a couple of European researchers have done just that and the results are ‘mixed’. By which I mean that the evidence contradicts the theory!
…we find that smoking bans, on average, neither increase nor decrease people’s subjective well-being to a sizable and statistically significant degree. Higher cigarette prices are related to overall lower reported levels of satisfaction with life, ceteris paribus. The partial correlation is, however, measured with a large standard error. Still, the effect is economically meaningful (and corroborated by our differential analysis for people with different smoking propensities). For a fifty percent price increase, we estimate a reduction in average life satisfaction of 0.02 points (on a four point scale). This is about one tenth of the effect of being unemployed rather than employed or equivalent to the effect of a 2.4 percentage points higher rate of unemployment on the population at large. This finding does not lend support to the effectiveness of cigarette taxes as an internalization strategy. Higher cigarette prices at least have overall negative short-term effects.
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Additionally, smoking bans turn out to be beneficial to smokers who would like to stop smoking (or not start again). For those smokers who are most likely to find themselves in a situation where they have recently tried to give up smoking but have relapsed, life satisfaction increases between 0.03 to 0.08 points with smoking bans (depending on the specification). This is evidence that supports the idea that smoking bans can serve as a self-control device. Interestingly, the same group of people does not benefit from higher cigarette prices. Rather to the contrary, these people seem to suffer to the same extend as other smokers do who have not recently tried to stop in response to higher prices. The negative effect of higher cigarette prices on smokers, particularly those who are likely to have self-control problems, runs counter to the prominent finding by Gruber and Mullainathan (2005) for the United States where positive effects of higher cigarette taxes on the well-being of smokers are identified.
Update: Eric comments.