) According to the Surgeon General's most recent report on smoking, tobacco use on the part of teenagers remains a significant public health problem. Nearly all smokers first use tobacco prior to high school graduation, and fully one-third of high school-aged teenagers smoke or use smokeless tobacco. Just as troubling, the rate of increase in teenage smoking has not declined in the past few years, despite substantial declines in smoking in the general population. The unfortunate consequence is that we pay a heavy price in terms of both morbidity and mortality that could otherwise be prevented if we were more successful in curtailing teenage smoking. The main objective of the proposed project is to conduct a detailed examination of the determinants of teenage smoking behavior. We will focus our study on the effects of two potentially powerful public policies that could be applied to deter or reduce teenage cigarette smoking: increasing cigarette prices (by increasing excise taxes), and restricting smoking in public places. We will examine two general hypotheses in the proposed project. First, after controlling for other factors known to influence teenage cigarette consumption, (including demographic variables and familial and peer smoking habits), we expect that teenagers do respond to higher cigarette prices by being less likely to experiment with or initiate smoking, and by smoking less if they decide to smoke at all. Second, we expect that teenage smoking behavior will also be responsive to laws and regulations that restrict smoking in public places. To analyze these hypotheses, the proposed study will apply a variety of state-of-the-art statistical and econometric techniques to two relatively new and extremely rich person-level sources of data--the 1989 and 1993 National Health Interview Surveys of Teenage Attitudes and Practices, or TAPS. We expect that the results from the proposed research will make a significant contribution to the ongoing debate at the federal, state, and local levels regarding the effectiveness of these two policy options to reduce teenage smoking initiation rates and to limit the quantity of cigarettes consumed by current teenage smokers.
