The Fires are not out yet: Higher Taxes and Young Adult Smoking

In recent policy discussions, the conventional wisdom is that adolescent smoking is substantially more tax- or price-responsive than adult smoking.¹ In a previous study, we used data from the first three waves of the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) to estimate the impact of taxes and prices on smoking initiation during adolescence (DeCicca, Kenkel, & Mathios, 2002). Contrary to the conventional wisdom, we found weak or non-existent tax/price effects in our models of the onset of adolescent smoking between 1988 and 1992. In this study, we use data from the 2000 wave of NELS, when most respondents were about 26 years old. Although cigarette prices increased by almost 40% in real terms between 1992 and 2000, smoking prevalence among the NELS respondents also increased from 18% to 23%, about the same increase observed in other cohorts over these ages.