Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Several states, counties, and cities have recently raised the minimum age for legal access to tobacco products to 21 many are in the process of adopting one. The policy question is whether these laws affect smoking behavior of those who are now banned from legally purchasing tobacco products and if so, do they substitute other substances such as alcohol and marijuana with tobacco products? To answer these questions, I utilize data on senior high school students from Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey for 2007-2015. Several individual level covariates such as age, gender, race, income, and maternal education along with state and county-level policy variables including tobacco taxes, beer taxes, smoking bans , and vaping bans are included in the model. Using a difference –in-differences identification strategy and considering those students who are above the conventional minimum legal ages (18 or 19 depending on the state of residence, around 50 percent of the MTF sample) results suggest that these laws significantly reduce the incidence of smoking in the past 30 days among high school senior students over 18 or 19 while the effect is more pronounced for girls. I also found no substitution between cigarettes and alcohol or marijuana.