The Real Effect of Smoking Bans: Evidence from Corporate Innovation

By Huasheng Gao, Po-Hsuan Hsu, Kai Li, Jin Zhang. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 2018

167 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We identify a positive causal effect of healthy working environments on corporate innovation, using the staggered passage of U.S. state-level laws that ban smoking in workplaces. We find a significant increase in patents and patent citations for firms headquartered in states that have adopted such laws relative to firms headquartered in states without such laws. The increase is more pronounced for firms in states with stronger enforcement of such laws and in states with weaker preexisting tobacco controls. We present suggestive evidence that smoke-free laws affect innovation by improving inventor health and productivity and by attracting more productive inventors.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ba4a7cfc42446433d672ae26fa9a8f29a34a3f56