Translations:ENDS Taxes/4/en

• Currently, Congress is considering doubling the cigarette excise tax (to $2.01 per pack) and setting the ENDS tax to parity with the new cigarette tax (Durbin 2021). This tax, if adopted, would imply a roughly $2.01 tax per 0.7 fluid mL of nicotine, assuming a Juul pod is equivalent to a pack of cigarettes (Truth Initiative 2019), or $2.87 per fluid mL. Our MTF results suggest that this would reduce youth current ENDS use by 5.5 pp but raise current cigarette use by 3.7 pp, assuming that the cigarette tax portion of the bill has no effect as suggested by the small, statistically insignificant cigarette tax effects estimated in this paper, and other recent studies (Hansen, Sabia, and Rees 2017). The YRBSS results meanwhile suggest much larger reductions in youth current ENDS use, but a sizable increase in youth current cigarette use of 2.3 pp. If ENDS are substantially safer products as suggested by several major government-commissioned reviews (McNeill et al. 2018; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2018; UK Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment 2020), our results suggest that the proposed bill may harm youth health in the United States
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• Citation: Intended and Unintended Effects of E-cigarette Taxes on Youth Tobacco Use, Rahi Abouk, Charles J. Courtemanche, Dhaval M. Dave, Bo Feng, Abigail S. Friedman, Johanna Catherine Maclean, Michael F. Pesko, Joseph J. Sabia, and Samuel Safford, NBER Working Paper No. 29216, September 2021, JEL No. H2,I1,I18
• Acknowledgement: Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health under award number R01DA045016 (PI: Michael Pesko), R01DA039968 (PI: Dhaval Dave), and an Evidence for Action grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (grant #74869; PI: Friedman). Dr. Sabia acknowledges support from San Diego State University’s Center for Health Economics & Policy Studies (CHEPS), Dr. Courtemanche acknowledges support from the University of Kentucky’s Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise, and Dr. Abouk acknowledges support from William Paterson University’s Cannabis Research Institute. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.