TY - JOUR AU - Avery,Rosemary AU - Kenkel,Donald AU - Lillard,Dean R. AU - Mathios,Alan TI - Private Profits and Public Health: Does Advertising Smoking Cessation Products Encourage Smokers to Quit? JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 11938 PY - 2006 Y2 - January 2006 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11938 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11938.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Donald S. Kenkel Department of Policy Analysis and Management College of Human Ecology Cornell University Martha Van Rensselaer Hall Ithaca, NY 14853-4401 Tel: 607/255-2594 Fax: 607/255-0799 E-Mail: dsk10@cornell.edu Alan D. Mathios 182 MVR Hall Cornell University Ithaca NY 14853 E-Mail: adm5@cornell.edu AB - To shed new light on the role private profit incentives play in promoting public health, in this paper we conduct an empirical study of the impact of pharmaceutical industry advertising on smoking cessation decisions. We link survey data on individual smokers with an archive of magazine advertisements. The rich survey data allow us to measure smokers' exposure to smoking cessation advertisements based on their magazine-reading habits. Because we observe the same information about the consumers that the advertisers observe, we can control for the potential endogeneity of advertising due to firms' targeting decisions. We find that when smokers are exposed to more advertising, they are more likely to attempt to quit and are more likely to have successfully quit. While some of the increased quitting behavior involves purchases of smoking cessation products, our results indicate that advertisements for smoking cessation products also increase the probability of quitting without the use of any product. Thus, the public health returns to smoking cessation product advertisements exceed the private returns to the manufacturers. Because advertising of a wide range of consumer products may have important and under-studied spillover effects on various non-market behaviors, our results have broad implications for the economics of advertising. ER -