Business Commons^™

Was Television Responsible For A New Generation Of Smokers?, Michael Thomas

Marketing

Consumers’ response to mass media can be difficult to assess because individuals choose for themselves the amount of media they consume, and that choice may be correlated with their other consumption decisions. To avoid this selection problem, this article examines the introduction of television to the US, during which some cities gained access to television years before others. This natural experiment makes it possible to estimate the causal impact of television on the decision to start smoking, a consumer behavior with important public health implications. Difference-in-differences analyses of television’s introduction indicate that (1) television did cause people to start smoking, …