Henry Saffer

The effect of tobacco advertising bans on tobacco consumption

Tobacco advertising is a public health issue if these activities increase smoking. Although public health advocates assert that tobacco advertising does increase smoking, there is significant empirical literature that finds little or no effect of tobacco advertising. In this paper, these prior studies are examined more closely with several important insights emerging from this analysis. This paper also provides new empirical evidence on the effect of tobacco advertising in 22 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The primary conclusion of this research is that a comprehensive set of tobacco advertising bans can reduce tobacco consumption and that a limited set of advertising bans will have little or no effect.

Alcohol Control Policies and Motor Vehicle Fatalities

The purpose of this study is to estimate the effects of drunk driving deterrents and other alcohol related policies on drunk driving. The data set employed is an annual time-series of state cross-sections for the 48 contiguous states of the U.S. from 1982 through 1988. Total and alterative alcohol involved motor vehicle fatality rates, for the general population and for 18 to 20 year olds, are used as measures of drunk driving. The results indicate that the moat effective policies are increased beer taxes and mandatory administrative license actions. Maintaining the beer tax at its real 1951 value would have reduced fatalities by 11.5 percent annually, on average, during the sample period. A mandatory administrative license sanction of one year would have reduced fatalities by 9 percent. The next most effective policies are a 21 year old legal drinking age, preliminary breath test and dram shop laws and relatively large mandatory fines. These policies each reduce total fatalities by about 5 to 6 percent. No plea bargaining provisions and mandatory license sanctions upon conviction are also found to have some deterrent effect. Other drunk driving laws tested include mandatory jail sentences and community service options, illegal per se laws, and open container laws. None of these were found to have a deterrent effect on drunk driving.

Alcohol advertising bans and alcohol abuse: An international perspective

This paper examines the effect of banning broadcast advertising of alcoholic beverages. The data used in this study are a pooled time series from 17 countries for the period 1970 to 1983. The empirical results show that countries with bans on spirits advertising have about 16% lower alcohol consumption than countries with no bans and that countries with bans on beer and wine advertising have about 11% lower alcohol consumption than countries with bans only on spirits advertising.

BREATH TESTING AND HIGHWAY FATALITY RATES

This paper presents an empirical investigation of the effect of a preliminary breath test law on highway fatality rates. A preliminary breath test law reduces the procedural problems associated with obtaining evidence of drunk driving and thus increases the probability that a drunk driver will be arrested. According to the theory of deterrence, increasing the probability of arrest for drunk driving will reduce the occurrence of this behaviour. The data set employed to test the theory is a time series from 1980 to 1985 of cross sections of the 48 contiguous states of the United States. Four highway fatality rates are used as measures of drunk driving. The effect of the breath test law was estimated using four independent variable models and 12 dummy variable models. The four independent variable models were also estimated using Learners specification test. The purpose of using these alternative specifications and Learners specification test was to examine the breath test coefficients for specification bi...

State Anti-Tobacco Advertising and Smoking Outcomes by Gender and Race/Ethnicity

Objective. This paper examines overall and gender- and racial/ethnic-specific relationships between exposure to state-sponsored anti-tobacco televised advertising and smoking-related outcomes among US middle and high school students using five years of cross-sectional nationally representative data. Design. Nationally representative 8th, 10th, and 12th grade student sample data for 1999–2003 were merged with commercial ratings data on mean potential audience exposure to network and cable television anti-tobacco advertising across the 74 largest US designated market areas, resulting in a final sample size for analysis of 122,340. Associations between state-sponsored anti-tobacco televised advertising exposure and youth smoking-related beliefs and behaviours were modelled while controlling for relevant individual and environmental factors as well as other televised tobacco-related advertising. Results. Higher potential for exposure to state anti-tobacco advertising within the previous four months was generally associated with decreasing odds of current smoking across groups. In addition, such exposure was related, to varying degrees, with decreased perceptions that most/all friends smoked, stronger five-year intentions not to smoke, and increased perceived harm of smoking. These relationships appeared possibly to be weaker for Asian students. Conclusions. The results from these analyses indicate that state anti-tobacco advertising significantly relates to beneficial outcomes—especially regarding current smoking behaviour—among US youth as a whole.

Demand for smokeless tobacco: Role of advertising

While the prevalence of smokeless tobacco (ST) is low relative to smoking, the distribution of ST use is highly skewed with consumption concentrated among certain segments of the population (rural residents, males, whites, low-educated individuals). Furthermore, there is suggestive evidence that use has trended upwards recently for groups that have traditionally been at low risk of using ST, and thus started to diffuse across demographics. This study provides the first estimates, at the national level, of the effects of magazine advertising on ST use. The focus on magazine advertising is significant given that ST manufacturers have been banned from using other conventional media since the 1986 Comprehensive ST Act and the 1998 ST Master Settlement Agreement. This study is based on the 2003-2009 waves of the National Consumer Survey (NCS), a unique data source that contains extensive information on the reading habits of individuals, matched with magazine-specific advertising information over the sample period. This allows detailed and salient measures of advertising exposure at the individual level and addresses potential bias due to endogeneity and selective targeting. We find consistent and robust evidence that exposure to ST ads in magazines raises ST use, especially among males, with an estimated elasticity of 0.06. There is suggestive evidence that both ST taxes and cigarette taxes reduce ST use, indicating contemporaneous complementarity between these tobacco products. Sub-analyses point to some differences in the advertising and tax response across segments of the population. The effects from this study inform the debate on the cost and benefits of ST use and its potential to be a tool in overall tobacco harm reduction.

Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Differences in Physical Activity

This study examines racial, ethnic and gender (REG) differentials in physical activity (PA), a significant input into human capital investments. We construct detailed and all-inclusive PA measures from the American Time Use Surveys, which capture both the duration and the intensity of each activity. Estimates suggest significant REG differentials in work-related and various modes of nonwork PA, with 30–65 percent of these differentials attributed to differences in education, socioeconomic status, time constraints, and locational attributes. These conditional PA differentials are consistent with and may play a role in observed REG disparities in health outcomes.

Alcohol advertising bans and alcohol abuse: Reply

Young reexamines the work first presented in Saffer (1991) on the relationship between alcohol advertising bans and alcohol use. While there are several interesting possibilities for extending Saffer (1991), Young fails to provide any new insights. Most of his paper is devoted to recreating my data and results. He tries to extend my work with three new specifications. Each of these new specifications is flawed. His errors include a inappropriate application of fixed effects models, inappropriate dependent variables, and incorrect serial correlation computations. The results of these errors are a series of inconsistent advertising ban coefficients. He concludes that these inconsistent results are evidence that advertising bans have no effect of alcohol abuse. It might be better to at least provide a series of consistent regression models before coming to any conclusions.

A behavioral economic model of alcohol advertising and price

This paper presents a new empirical study of the effects of televised alcohol advertising and alcohol price on alcohol consumption. A novel feature of this study is that the empirical work is guided by insights from behavioral economic theory. Unlike the theory used in most prior studies, this theory predicts that restriction on alcohol advertising on TV would be more effective in reducing consumption for individuals with high consumption levels but less effective for individuals with low consumption levels. The estimation work employs data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, and the empirical model is estimated with quantile regressions. The results show that advertising has a small positive effect on consumption and that this effect is relatively larger at high consumption levels. The continuing importance of alcohol taxes is also supported. Education is employed as a proxy for self-regulation, and the results are consistent with this assumption. The key conclusion is that restrictions on alcohol advertising on TV would have a small negative effect on drinking, and this effect would be larger for heavy drinkers. Copyright

The effect of alcohol consumption on the earnings of older workers

This study analyses the effects of alcohol consumption on the labour market outcomes of older individuals. The data set used consists of five waves of the Health and Retirement Study. The results from models with a limited number of covariates indicate that there is a wage and earnings premium associated with alcohol use. This premium progressively diminishes as more individual-level controls are added to the standard earnings function. The data set is longitudinal which allows for estimation of individual-fixed-effects specifications. These results indicate that alcohol use does not have a positive effect on earnings and wages.