Tobacco Politics and Electoral Accountability in the United States

Abstract

This paper investigates whether reputation-building strategies guide U.S. governors' state cigarette tax choices, and whether the federal cigarette tax influence such behavior. Using 1975-2000 data, we find evidence that governors in states with relatively important agricultural tobacco production and tobacco manufacturing, and which are densely populated by smokers, appear prone to reputationbuilding. Moreover, lame ducks are less prone to raise the state cigarette tax the higher the federal tax.

Asymmetry and hysteresis in the Russian gasoline market: The rationale for green energy exports

“…This evidence seems to point out that excise taxes have been actively used in the last decade as a tool to fine-tune the gasoline prices following changes in crude oil prices. Therefore, Russian practice seems to have become more in line with international practice, where excise taxes are used to manage the gasoline price in case of adverse changes in its fundamentals or close to elections, see Bagnai and Ospina (2015) and references therein 8 : in this regard, there is a large literature (particularly in the US) that shows how excise taxes can be used in the election cycles to increase the chances of being (re)-elected, see Decker andWohar (2007), Esteller-Moré andRizzo (2014), Fredriksson and Mamun (2014), and references therein. To confirm this evidence with excise taxes, an additional analysis at the micro-level would definitely be needed, so we leave this interesting issue as an avenue for further research.…”

Excise Tax Setting in a Dynamic Space-time Framework

“…Carpenter and Mathes (2015) find that tax competition from online sales and Indian reservations play a significant role in influencing cigarette prices. Fredriksson and Mamun (2012) find that electoral accountability, especially gubernatorial lame ducks, are similarly responsible for cigarette tax rate increases. Rork and Wagner (2012) find that reciprocity agreements states with reciprocity agreements exhibit increased levels of competition over nonincome taxes.…”

Partisan Politics and Excise Tax Rates in the United States

“…They find evidence for this hypothesis with respect to cigarette taxes but not gasoline taxes and argue that the former is a better representation of a "secondary policy" of the type modeled by List and Sturm (2006). Fredriksson and Mamun (2014) also show evidence for the reputation building model by finding that the cigarette excise tax rate is higher when the governor is a lame duck. As anecdotal evidence, they point to the case of Maryland in the 1990s, when multiple governors pushed through cigarette tax increases in their lame duck term.…”

“…These results also help clarify existing empirical evidence on the determinants of excise tax policy. This literature has cited interstate tax competition 1 (Devereux, Lockwood, and Redoano, 2007; Esteller-Moré and Rizzo, 2014), yardstick competition, in which voters first compare their government's policies to those in neighboring jurisdictions before casting ballots (Esteller-Moré and Rizzo, 2014), and reputation building among single-issue voters (Esteller-Moré and Rizzo, 2014; Fredriksson and Mamun, 2014) as determinants of state-level cigarette tax rates, but not gasoline or spirit excise tax rates.…”

“… 2. Fredriksson and Mamun (2014) include political control variables but neither report nor discuss the coefficients on these variables.…”