From Workplace to Living Room: Do Indoor Smoking Bans Cultivate Anti-Smoking Norms Beyond Their Legal Reach?

Abstract

Do laws that ban smoking in public places merely relocate smokers, or do they cultivate lasting anti-smoking norms that extend into unregulated private settings? I exploit the staggered adoption of comprehensive indoor smoking bans across 29 U.S.\ jurisdictions between 2002 and 2016, using a doubly-robust difference-in-differences estimator applied to individual-level BRFSS data covering 7.5 million adults over 22 years. I find no statistically significant effect on current smoking prevalence, quit attempts, or the education gradient in treatment effects. The estimated effects are small and indistinguishable from zero across all specifications. These null results suggest that indoor smoking bans—while effective at regulating venue-specific behavior—do not generate detectable spillovers into voluntary private smoking behavior, placing an upper bound on the "expressive" norm-changing power of mandates.