Dean R. Lillard

Sciendo provides publishing services and solutions to academic and professional organizations and individual authors. We publish journals, books, conference proceedings and a variety of other publications.

Objective:The purpose of this study was to document exposure to alcohol advertising by sex, age, and the level and type of alcohol people consume.Method:We use unique marketing survey data that link the media individuals consume and advertising appearing in those media. Our sample of 306,451 men and women represents the population age 18 and older living in the 48 contiguous United States between 1996 and 2009. We measure advertising exposure not with the standard expenditure data but with counts of actual advertisements people likely saw. We relate advertising exposure across groups defined by age, gender, and the amount of beer, wine, and spirits consumed.Results:We found that drinkers, particularly young male drinkers, see much more alcohol advertising. Men, especially younger men, see more advertisements for alcohol of all types than do women. Their higher exposure is largely explained by sex differences in the propensity to read sports and adult magazines and to watch sports and gambling television p...

We investigate whether individuals are less likely to start and more likely to quit smoking in years when newspapers publish more articles about the health risks of smoking. With data from 9030 respondents to the 2008 Global Adult Tobacco Survey in Turkey, we construct respondents’ life-course smoking histories back to 1925 and model initiation and cessation decisions taken 1925–2008. To measure information, we count articles published in Milliyet, one of Turkey’s major newspapers. Results from linear probability models show that people who have seen more smoking-health risk articles know more about the smoking–health relationship. Holding constant each individual’s information stock, education, place of residence, and the price of cigarettes, we find that, as new information arrives, male and female smokers in all cohorts are significantly more likely to quit and women are less likely to start. Our analysis is one of the first that examines how new information affects smoking decisions while controlling for each individual’s existing stock of information.

In their recent paper, Bilal et al. (1) incorrectly assert that no researchers have assessed the validity of historical smoking prevalence derived from retrospectively reported data. A large body of literature validates this type of data in general (2–4) and smoking data in particular (5–12). In fact, at least 2 previously published studies applied an improved method (8, 9) with better data.