Estimating the impacts of cigarette taxes on youth smoking participation, initiation, and persistence: empirical evidence from Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In response to the widespread availability of illegal contraband, the federal and five provincial governments in Canada implemented a 40-60% reduction to cigarette excise taxes in February 1994. We exploit this unique and discrete policy shock by estimating the effects of cigarette taxes on youth smoking with data from the 1992-1996 Waterloo Smoking Prevention Program, 1991 General Social Survey, 1994 Youth Smoking Survey, 1996-1997 and 1998-1999 National population Health Surveys, and the 1999 Canadian Tobacco Use Monitoring Survey. Empirical estimates yield daily and occasional participation elasticities from -0.10 to -0.14, which is consistent with findings from recent U.S.-based research. A key contribution of this research is in the analysis of lower taxes on a panel of 591 youths from the Waterloo Smoking Prevention Program, who did not smoke in 1993, but 43% of whom confirm smoking participation following the tax reduction. Employing these data reveals elasticities from -0.2 to -0.5, which suggest that even significant and discrete changes in taxes might have limited impacts on the initiation and persistence of youth smoking.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".