Political Bias in Research on the Economics of Smoking Bans

Or so argues Michael Marlow in the latest issue of Econ Journal Watch. The article is entitled "Honestly, Who Else Would Fund Such Research? Reflections of a Non-Smoking Scholar", and it is a fascinating story about his own historical research on the degree to which private markets successfully dealt with the externalities associated with public smoking. It's also an argument for the deep bias against doing research on the accommodation of private markets to address problems like market externalities, and specifically how that has played out in the smoking literature. I suspect that Marlow is right. I've also noticed a very quick jump to market failure when discussing health-related issues. But Marlow makes a very good point: since we know markets and government fail to allocate resources efficiently (the second being a problem known in public choice as "government failure"), which approach incurs the least cost to society? That is ultimately the only relevant question when it comes to policy. It's insufficient to simply point out the market failure, and propose government intervention without also showing the relative costs of the two approaches. I heartily recommend Marlow's piece as a general piece of wisdom on how to do proper empirical work while pursuing policy-related work.

One comment jumped out at me from the paper, which I'll post here.

The probability that an area has a ban is positively related to the non-smoking • share of the population, so bans are endogenous and tend to be enacted after
private markets have already been accommodating in favor of non-smokers.