INTRODUCTION The effectiveness of excise tax increases as a tool for reducing tobacco consumption depends largely on how the tax increases impact the retail price. We estimate this relationship in South Africa for 2001-2015. DATA Statistics South Africa provided disaggregated cigarette price data, used in the calculation of the Consumers' Price Index. Data on the excise tax per cigarette were...

I use an instrumental variable approach to estimate the effect of excise taxes on cigarette smuggling. The IV approach addresses the potential endogeneity of excise taxes while controlling for other determinants of smuggling. I use panel data on 47 states from 19902009. The main results confirm the validity of the instrument, the percent of Democrats in the upper house of state legislatures, bu...

Lifetime income is less variable than annual household income, since the latter reflects transitory shocks to wages, family status, and employment. This implies that lowincome households in one year have some chance of being higherincome households in other years, and significantly affects the estimated distributional burden of excise taxes. This paper shows that household expenditures on gasol...

The paper provides an extension and a new proof of Deaton’s theorem on the undesirability of nonuniform excise taxation when income taxes are a¢ ne and preferences over consumption goods are separable from labour-leisure choices, homothetic, and identical across agents. Key Words: Optimal Excise Taxes, Atkinson-Stiglitz Theorem, Deaton’s Theorem JEL Classi…cation: H21

BACKGROUND Tobacco taxes are one of the most effective ways to reduce tobacco use. Transnational tobacco companies (TTCs) claim they wish to develop and secure excise systems that benefit both governments and the profitability of the companies themselves. The objective of the paper is to use the case of Ukraine, with its inconsistent history of excise tax changes in 1992-2008, to explore tobacc...