The Impact of Physician Intervention and Tobacco Control Policies on Average Daily Cigarette Consumption Among Adult Smokers

Physicians' advice to stop smoking has been found to increase smoking cessation rates in controlled clinical trials. However, these finding may not be applicable under real world conditions. This paper investigates the impact of physicians' advice and tobacco control policies on conditional cigarette demand among adults employing non-experimental data. Because the data is non-experimental, the variable reflect physician advice to stop smoking and cigarette consumption are likely to be endogenous. We implement a three stage least squares regression technique designed to take account the joint determination of physician advice and cigarette smoking. The results from these models imply that smokers that received advice from their physician to quit smoking will decrease their average daily consumption by between 5-6 cigarettes per day as compared to smoker who do not receive advice. This result implies that physicians' advice is effective in curtailing smoking in real world settings. Other policies that were found to decrease average smoking by smokers include: the real price of cigarettes and clean indoor air laws.