Taxes, Cigarette Consumption, and Smoking Intensity: Reply This paper shows that smoking intensity, i.e. the amount of nicotine extracted per cigarette smoked, responds to changes in excise taxes and tobacco prices. We exploit data covering the period 1988 to 2006 across many US states. Moreover, we provide new evidence on the importance of cotinine measures in explaining long-run smoking behav...

Objective: To estimate cigarette demand and to simulate a tax policy targeted to reduce tobacco consumption. Materials and methods: Demand was estimated using a vector error correction model. Simulation exercises present the impact of a tax increase on consumption and revenues. Results: Changes in real income and the real price of cigarettes affect the demand for cigarettes in Argentina. Th...

BACKGROUND Taxes on alcohol and tobacco have long been an important means of raising revenues for public spending in many countries but there is increasing interest in using taxes on these, and other unhealthy products, to achieve public health goals. We present a systematic review of the research on health taxes, and aim to generate insights into how such taxes can: (i) reduce consumption of t...

The paper provides an extension and a new proof of Deaton’s theorem on the undesirability of nonuniform excise taxation when income taxes are a¢ ne and preferences over consumption goods are separable from labour-leisure choices, homothetic, and identical across agents. Key Words: Optimal Excise Taxes, Atkinson-Stiglitz Theorem, Deaton’s Theorem JEL Classi…cation: H21

This paper derives the incidence of linear taxes on capital and labor in a competitive equilibrium in balanced growth. The paper further considers a tax on consumption and a tax credit. Tax incidence is determined using an analytic expression for the saving rate out of income net of all taxes and credits. Results for zero population growth do not extend to positive population growth, where the ...

This review summarizes current understanding of economic factors during the obesity epidemic and dispels some widely held, but incorrect, beliefs. Rising obesity rates coincided with increases in leisure time (rather than increased work hours), increased fruit and vegetable availability (rather than a decline in healthier foods), and increased exercise uptake. As a share of disposable income, A...

This paper analyzes the effects of government debt and income taxes on consumption and saving in a world of infinitely lived households having uncertain and heterogeneous incomes. The special structure of the model allows exact aggregation across households despite incomplete markets. The effects of government debt are shown to be substantial, roughly comparable to those resulting from finite h...

Recent studies find that environmental tax swaps typically exacerbate the costs of the tax system and therefore do not produce a “double dividend”. We extend previous models by incorporating taxfavored consumption goods (e.g. housing, medical care). In this setting, the efficiency gains from recycling environmental tax revenues are larger because pre-existing taxes distort the consumption bundl...

BACKGROUND About half of all US states have cigarette minimum price laws (MPLs) that require a per cent mark-up on prices, but research suggests they may not be very effective in raising prices. An alternative type of MPL sets a floor price below which packs cannot be sold, and may be more promising. This new type of MPL policy has only been implemented in 1 city, therefore its benefits relativ...

Previous work on the effect of taxes on foreign direct investment (FDI) focused primarily on capital income taxes. We investigate the proposition that other forms of taxation may also deter FDI. We use tax ratios, i.e., average effective tax rates, on consumption, labor and capital income for a panel of 25 OECD countries from 1975-2006. We find that increases in relative tax rates on capital in...