Andreas Stoller – PhD Student in Economics

Stoller, A. (2026). Impact of Tobacco Advertising Restrictions in Switzerland: A Quasi-Experimental Study on the Effect of Billboard Bans on Smoking. arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.08352. (Job Market Paper)

Abstract: This study assesses the impact of tobacco billboard bans on smoking in Switzerland, exploiting their staggered adoption across regions, i.e., the cantons. Based on retrospective smoking histories from the Swiss Health Survey, a panel of individuals’ annual smoking status is reconstructed, containing more than one million observations from 1993 to 2017. Estimation relies on staggered difference-in-differences as well as a complementary latent factor model, which relaxes the common trends assumption. The findings indicate that tobacco billboard bans lead to a reduction in smoking rates. Reductions of up to 0.9 percentage points correspond to an approximate 3% decline in the smoking rate. The effect is driven by women and individuals aged 25–44 and 65+. Overall, this evidence suggests that even partial tobacco advertising bans, such as billboard bans, can effectively reduce smoking rates and serve as a valuable policy tool within comprehensive tobacco prevention strategies.

"Effect of Cigarette Price and Tax Increases on Smoking in Europe: A Difference-in-Differences Study with Double Machine Learning", with Martin Huber (available upon request)

Abstract: We estimate the effect of cigarette price and tax increases on smoking rates using Eurobarometer survey data covering 27 countries from 2012 to 2020. Employing a difference-in-differences estimator with double machine learning, we relax restrictive functional form assumptions typically imposed by parametric approaches such as two-way fixed effects. Our results indicate that tax increases reduce the smoking rates, particularly among individuals aged 15–24. We find that among individuals exposed to a tax increase, the smoking rate decreases by 3.44 percentage points (p-value = 0.04) in the post-treatment period for those who smoke cigarettes at least once per month. For daily cigarette smokers, the reduction is 3.15 percentage points (p-value = 0.09). In contrast, we find no significant effects for price increases. To assess the role of functional form assumptions, we compare our estimates based on flexible methods with those from conventional parametric methods and find qualitatively similar results across both approaches.