Impact of Tobacco Advertising Restrictions in Switzerland: A Quasi-Experimental Study on the Effect of Billboard Bans on Smoking

TL;DR

This study evaluates the impact of tobacco billboard bans in Switzerland, showing that such restrictions significantly reduce smoking rates, especially among women and specific age groups, supporting their role in tobacco control policies.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the effectiveness of billboard bans in reducing smoking, using a novel staggered difference-in-differences approach with extensive longitudinal data.

Findings

Billboard bans reduce smoking rates by up to 0.9 percentage points.

The effect is more pronounced among women and age groups 25-44 and 65+.

Partial advertising bans can be an effective component of tobacco control strategies.

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.