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Journal of Economics and Finance

Erschienen in:

01.01.2015

On the demand for smoking quitlines

verfasst von: Rajeev K. Goel

Erschienen in: Journal of Economics and Finance | Ausgabe 1/2015

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Abstract

Using recent cross-state U.S. data, this paper estimates the demand for calls to smoking quitlines. Besides formal insights into the determinants of quitline demand, another key contribution is to provide unique insights on the role of related internet resources, using two novel measures. Results show that higher cigarette prices, lower income, and greater government resources increase the demand for quitline calls, with the internet measures having positive but statistically insignificant effects. In terms of magnitude, the elasticity of quitline calls with respect to cigarette prices was about four times greater than that with respect to public funds for quitlines. Policy implications are discussed.

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According to the North American Quitline Consortium, “Quitlines are telephone-based tobacco cessation services that help tobacco users quit. Services offered by quitlines include coaching and counseling, referrals, mailing materials, training to healthcare providers, Web-based services and, in some instances, free medications such as nicotine replacement therapy (NRT)”, (www.naquitline.org).

Laxminarayan and Deolalikar (2004) note that besides inducing quitting, higher cigarette prices might also promote switching to other (cheaper) tobacco products.

With appropriate data on individual smokers, one could also incorporate smoking intensity, with heavier smokers more likely to call quitlines, ceteris paribus.

For example, a search in Google.com with keywords, “smoking quit tobacco cigarettes cessation stop resources state “Alabama”” yielded 180,000 hits and we recorded this number for Alabama (later normalized by the state’s population in the analysis). As the reader might have noticed, the 180,000 hits for Alabama do not necessarily all include unique webpages about cessation resources for Alabama—there could be some mirror sites. However, further refinements are beyond the scope of this work; and in any case, all states are equally likely to have such duplication instances.

Given that some cities and counties have their own anti-smoking initiatives, one could fine-tune the internet searches to examine quitline resources available at the local level.

Specifically, putting the state name in quotations in the search and adding the word “state” weeds out references to personal names in some internet sites. Further, in the case of states like North Carolina that share part of their names with other states, the search included the word “South” with a minus sign prefixed to eliminate references to South Carolina.

Spending on quitlines includes expenses for maintaining quitlines and for providing related support materials.

The Master Settlement Agreement, signed in 1998 between states and tobacco companies, imposed wide-ranging limitations on the marketing and sale of tobacco products and provided cash payments to states spread over many years (see Goel and Nelson (2007) and Viscusi (2002)).

It is possible that some MSA funds might figure in resources specifically allocated to quitlines. If that is the case, it is more likely that a year’s web spending would likely draw on last year’s MSA funds. Further, this possibility is also mitigated by the modest correlation between MSA and QuitSpend (see Appendix).

The latest figures available in this case are for the year 2006–07 (see Table 1).

As Table 1 notes, the internet search data was generated after the other data were available. There seems no easy way to position the internet searches prior to the rest of the data. However, many of the webpages reported in the searches had been available for a number of years.

Greater income can also be seen to proxy for greater literacy and more educated smokers might feel less inclined to obtain cessation guidance from quitlines (also see Hsieh (1998)).

Interestingly, the elasticity of quitline calls (QuitCall) with respect to quitline spending (QuitSpend) of 0.4 is remarkably similar in magnitude to the price elasticity of cigarette demand for earlier years found in many studies (see Chaloupka and Warner (2000), Gallet and List (2003) and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2000) for informative surveys; Cebula et al. (2011) for a recent example).

As an alternative to NoWeb, we considered including a dummy variable identifying the two states (New York and Wyoming) with comprehensive web-based quitline resources. The resulting coefficient was statistically insignificant. Details are available upon request.

For instance, (i) the number of web pages might change by the second; (ii) some pages might be in different languages; (iii) some driven, special interest groups in a given state might have disproportionately high number of web postings inflating the number of hits for those states, without a real increase in the information content. To address some of these issues, we tried to also do the internet searches using Yahoo.com. However, since the underlying search algorithms for Google and Yahoo searches are qualitatively different, Yahoo searches were generating more noise or unrelated matters in the searches (which could partly be a function of the sequence of the search terms entered in Yahoo). Thus, the used internet hits for the variable Internet were based only on Google search results.

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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2010) Tobacco control state highlights. US Department of Health and Human Services, Atlanta

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Titel: On the demand for smoking quitlines
verfasst von: Rajeev K. Goel
Publikationsdatum: 01.01.2015
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Journal of Economics and Finance / Ausgabe 1/2015
Print ISSN: 1055-0925
Elektronische ISSN: 1938-9744
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12197-013-9278-7

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