Document Type
Article
Date
5-2003
Keywords
tbd
Disciplines
Economics
Description/Abstract
An important issue in public policy analysis is the potential endogeneity of the policies under study. We examine the extent to which such political endogeneity biases estimates of behavioral parameters by identifying the elasticity of demand for cigarettes using the timing of state legislative elections as an instrument for changes in cigarette excise taxes. We find sizable differences between our estimates and those cited in Chaloupka and Warner (2000), which treat cigarette taxes as exogenous. Our results add to a growing body of evidence that policy changes may be codetermined with the outcomes they are thought to influence.
Recommended Citation
Kubik, Jeffrey D. and Moran, John R., "Can Policy Changes Be Treated as Natural Experiments? Evidence from Cigarette Excise Taxes" (2003). Economics - All Scholarship. 96.
https://surface.syr.edu/ecn/96
Source
Harvested from ssrn.com
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Additional Information
This manuscript is from the Social Science Research Network, for more information see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=269609#193443