Reservation Prices: An Economic Analysis of Cigarette Purchases on Indian Reservations1 Philip DeCicca NBER & Department of Economics McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario Canada
[email protected] Donald Kenkel NBER Department of Policy Analysis & Management Department of Economics Cornell University Ithaca NY 14850
[email protected] Feng Liu School of Economics Shanghai University of Finance and Economics Shanghai 200433, China
[email protected] April 2013 1This research was supported by # R21 CA131600-01A1 from the National Institutes of Health. We thank Daniel Kenkel for excellent legal research assistance. ABSTRACT The special legal status of Indian tribes in the U.S. means that state excise taxes are not necessarily collected on cigarette purchases on Indian reservations. We focus on two under- studied but basic empirical economic questions this raises. Using novel data from national and New York surveys that asked directly about cigarette prices and purchases from reservations, we first ask: What is the economic incidence of the tax break? In national data, we find evidence that the tax break is often approximately fully shifted to the consumer. However, the patterns are complex due to the variety of approaches different states have taken towards taxing reservation purchases. In data from New York over a period when the state did not attempt to collect taxes on reservation purchases, our estimates suggest that the tax break is usually fully shifted to the consumer. The notable exception is on one reservation where a tribal monopoly captures almost half of the tax break. Second, we ask: Has the tax break increased consumer demand for low- quality cigarettes relative to high-quality cigarettes? New York’s cigarette tax is a fixed amount per pack, providing an opportunity to test the Alchian and Allen substitution theorem.