Essays on Health Policy, Consumer Behavior, Social Beliefs, and Education

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three essays that study how policies, market environments, and social beliefs shape individual behavior and well-being. The first two essays focus on health policy and consumer behavior in the context of tobacco regulation, while the third essay examines the role of social beliefs within families in shaping educational outcomes.The first essay evaluates the effectiveness of state-level e-cigarette flavor restrictions using retail scanner data and a staggered difference-in-differences design. Using 2018–2019 retail scanner data and a staggered difference-in-differences design, we examine how state size affects policy evasion costs and the effectiveness of e-cigarette flavor restrictions. For every 10-mile increase in population-weighted average distance from borders, cross-border sales decrease by 4.6%. We find that flavor preferences play a greater role than loyalty to the e-cigarette product form in driving substitution: substitution toward menthol cigarettes (the primary flavored alternative) increases with distance from state borders, while substitution toward tobacco-flavored e-cigarettes (the non-flavored baseline permitted under bans) does not. Together, these results indicate that flavor bans’ effectiveness depends on geographic size and consumer access to alternatives, suggesting that evidence from local bans may systematically underestimate harmful substitution toward combustible products when implemented at broader scales. The second essay employs a structural demand model using retail scanner sales data and demographics in four U.S. states to assess the impact of e-cigarette and cigarette bans on different demographic groups. Our findings indicate that low-income consumers exhibit stronger product loyalty toward e-cigarettes, whereas Black consumers show a pronounced preference for flavored and menthol products. Areas with higher poverty rates or populations of young adults exhibit more inelastic demand for both cigarettes and e-cigarettes than areas with lower rates, suggesting that tax policies may be less effective in these populations. Our counterfactual analysis of banning different tobacco products suggests consumer segmentation: some consumers use e-cigarettes primarily for the flavors, while others do so because of the device itself or due to nicotine dependence. The third essay studies students’ second-order beliefs, defined as students’ perceptions of their parents’ beliefs, and their relationship with academic performance and psychological well-being. Using survey data from China, the essay documents that students who perceive their parents as holding gender-biased beliefs perform worse academically and report higher levels of unhappiness, even when parents’ own reported beliefs are not predictive of outcomes. To move beyond observational evidence, the essay proposes and develops a field experiment that measures parents’ and students’ beliefs separately and introduces randomized information revelation. This design provides a framework to study the causal effects of second-order beliefs, belief affirmation, and belief contradiction on students’ academic and mental health outcomes. Together, these essays contribute to a broader understanding of how policy design, market structure, and belief formation influence behavior across health and education contexts.