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Highlight for September
2007: Craig Gallet
Craig Gallet’s scrutiny of anti-smoking laws
isn’t a personal quest. Apart from the occasional cigar, the economics
professor isn’t a smoker and never had a particular interest in cigarettes.
But what does interest him are the factors that affect demand for consumer
products.
“I began this research with a student about three years
ago,” says Gallet. “I found that a lot of literature showed how smoking
bans affected the sales of cigarettes, but no link was ever made between
smoking bans and their affect on alcohol demand.”
In particular, Gallet was curious about the impact on
beer, wine and liquor sales in bars and restaurants once smoking was banned
in public areas. “The drop was statistically significant,” he says. “We
found that smoking bans did reduce alcohol consumption overall.
“It really helped our understanding that one public
policy could have this spillover influence into another social activity.”
Gallet’s study was recently published in Social Science Journal. Gallet
also looked into smoking bans and whether their enforcement affected
cigarette consumption. He found that ultimately, it was not the enforcement
of bans that prevented smokers from lighting up.
“It was the social pressure that the ban created that
was sufficient to get people to not smoke in public places,” Gallet says.
“We found the stigma associated with smoking was sufficient to make clean
indoor air laws self-enforcing.”
And while studying the merits of health information and
advertising restrictions as measures to reduce smoking, Gallet came across
some interesting findings. “We found that health warnings reduced cigarette
demand, but advertising restrictions mainly affected the supply-side of the
market.”
In other words, Joe Camel may not have turned a
non-smoker into a smoker, but he did influence smokers to buy his cigarette
brand
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