More than a Ban on Smoking? Behavioural Spillovers of Smoking Bans in the Workplace

Joan Costa-i-Font, Luca Salmasi and Sarah Zaccagni
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Joan Costa-i-Font

No 9587, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We study whether workplace smoking bans (WSBs), in addition to influencing smoking cessation, exert behavioural spillover effects on (i) a set of health behaviours, and (ii) on individuals not directly affected by the bans. So far we know little about WSBs as most of the evidence refers to smoking bans in public places. Drawing upon quasi-experimental variation from Russia, which introduced a WSB (in addition to a ban on smoking in public places), and adopting a difference-in-differences (DiD) strategy, which compares employed individuals (exposed to the work and public place ban) to unemployed individuals (exposed only to the ban in public places), we document three sets of findings. First, WSBs increase smoking cessation by 2.9 percentage points (pp) among men. Second, we find that quitters are less likely to use alcohol (6.7 pp reduction among men and 3.5 pp among women), and to reduce their alcohol consumption (10 percent among men). Finally, WSBs are found to influence the health behaviour of those not directly affected by the reform, such as never smokers. Our findings are consistent with a model of joint formation of health behaviours, and suggest the need to account for a wider set of spillover effects when estimating the welfare effect of WSBs.

Keywords: joint formation of behaviours; workplace smoking bans; behavioural spillovers; smoking; drinking; physical activity; healthy identity; Russia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H75 I18 L51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis and nep-hea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Working Paper: More than a Ban on Smoking? Behavioural Spillovers of Smoking Bans in the Workplace (2022)
Working Paper: More Than a Ban on Smoking? Behavioural Spillovers of Smoking Bans in the Workplace (2021)
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