E-cigarettes have become a big concern for public health, especially when it comes to young people using these harmful products. The U.S. government has considered a tax on vaping products to discourage people, especially underage users, from vaping. A new study from the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business aims to determine how much of an impact a tax might have by analyzing behavior on a social media platform.

In the paper "Smoke and Mirrors: Impact of E-cigarette Taxes on Underage Social Media Posting," published in Marketing Science on March 8, Vrinda Kadiyali, professor at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, and co-author Piyush Anand, assistant professor at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University, sought to cut through the barrier to data for the underage category and uncovered some interesting findings.

Kadiyali and Anand looked at Instagram pictures from 2016 to 2018 to see if the number of posts about vaping changed after a tax on vaping products was introduced in California. They figured that if they found fewer posts about vaping, especially from underage users, it might mean that the tax was working to reduce vaping among young people.

Read the full story on the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business news site, BusinessFeed.