Events

Abstract:
E-cigarette usage has grown significantly in the last few years, with special health concerns for underage usage. In response to this growing public health crisis, various states have enacted higher taxes to deter usage. Since underage usage is illegal, it is difficult to find data on their usage, and hence estimate the impact of these taxes. We exploit within – and across-state variation of publicly available 388,593 user-posted images on social media from Jan 2016 – Dec 2018 to measure the impact of greater taxes on underage posting behavior. This posting behavior is a rough proxy for influencing and normalizing behavior, and possibly for consumption behavior among underage population. We use an ensemble of image analysis methods – Mask R-CNN (He et al. 2017) and Aggregated Residual Neural Networks (Xie et al. 2017) to detect underage posters, and other demographics. Importantly, we develop methods to measure disguised posting of usage images, given their purported utilization by underage users. By using generalized synthetic controls (Xu 2017), we find that the states with higher taxes – Pennsylvania and California-saw a decline in underage e-cigarette posts. California’s decline is preceded by an increase in disguised posting, and Pennsylvania’s decline is accompanied by increased engagement with the underage posts. States with lower taxes – Kansas and West Virginia- saw no changes in underage posting. We also examine tax impact on posting by gender and race, given concerns of unequal health outcomes for particular groups. Our proposed approach of measuring e-cigarette posting behavior using social media images is likely to be of interest to regulators, managers, and businesses.