Article Critique: Understanding Smoking Bans

Article Critique
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Institutional Affiliation
Identification
The article "Why Understanding Smoking Bans is Important for Estimating Their Effects: California’s Restaurant Smoking Bans and Restaurant Sales" is an article written by Robert Fleck and Andrew Hansen. The article sought to understand the correlation, if any, between smoking bans and restaurant sales in the state of California. Being one of the first states to implement municipal, city and state smoking bans, California was the state of choice for the authors. The article was completed on September 5th 2006, and published in January 2008 in the Economic Inquiry. This was the 46th Volume of the Economic Inquiry. The article can be downloaded from the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) website. The identification number of the paper is SSRN-id929583. The link to the website is http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=929583.
Summary
The article makes some bold and interesting findings and conclusions, based on the research that they conducted. The article’s authors posit that the smoking bans that have been applied in many municipalities, cities and states are endogenous, and that rather than having smoking bans affecting growth of sales, the scenario is vice versa. The authors also argue that the treatment of smoking bans as homogenous by previous researchers has led to the realization of erroneous results. They assert that this assumption overlooks other critical sources of information such as demographic trends and human capital, thence the erroneous results. The authors also sought to determine and understand the effects, if any, that smoking bans have on smoking rates in municipalities, cities or states where smoking bans have been effected. Regression analysis and auto-correlation methods were the primary methodologies used to analyze the data acquired from diverse sources, and to establish connections, if any, between the data sets used.
The article makes some interesting findings, as well. For instance, the authors argue that social and demographic variables that inspire smoking bans in restaurants, or affect the rates at which customers demand and pay for meals in restaurants cannot possibly explain the notable differences in restaurant sales trends. Because of this, they argue, as well, that it is difficult to hinge restaurant sales trends on social and demographic variables directly. Another interesting realization that the authors made was that unlike previous studies that associate smoking bans with negative effects, smoking bans actually have both negative and positive effects in the areas they are applied. The effects realized were found to depend on the jurisdiction of the effected ban and on the trends that the areas experienced both before and after the ban took effect. The authors established that it was indeed difficult ...