Litigation and the political clout of the tobacco companies: cigarette taxes, prices, and the Master Settlement agreement (original) (raw)

3 There is some empirical evidence that state cigarette excise taxes are set at the level on average which accounts for the externalities that cigarette consumption causes (see Willard G. Manning et al., The Taxes of Sin. Do Smokers and Drinkers Pay Their Way? 261 JAMA 1604 (1989) and Willard G. Manning, Emmett B. Keeler, & Joseph P. Newhouse, The Cost of Poor Health Habits (1991)). But these results depend on treatment of secondary smoke within households (see Frank A. Sloan, Jan Osterman, & Gabriel Picone, The Private and Social Cost of Smoking (Manuscript, Duke Univ., 2003)) and not making assumptions that people smoke because they lack self-control. Assuming that smokers lack self-control,