Daniel Giovenco
Columbia University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology
Neighborhoods with many stores selling tobacco tend to have higher smoking rates and the health harms that follow. One new policy idea is to limit how many tobacco retailers can operate in an area.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Social Science
- Topics
tobacco control
tobacco retailer density
tobacco retail licensing
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2028
What they work on
- Measure how much tobacco retailer density falls under license-capping policies in San Francisco, Philadelphia and New York City, using archival tobacco retail licensing data.
- Track year-to-year changes in the tobacco marketplace during policy rollout through annual in-person audits of tobacco retailers in the study cities.
- Use semi-structured interviews with key community stakeholders to learn how they perceive the license cap, how they think it works, and how it changes behavior.
- Test whether falling tobacco retailer density is linked to smoking trends in New York City neighborhoods, using an annual population health survey with geocoded respondents.
More about the research
San Francisco, Philadelphia and New York City have recently capped the number of tobacco retail licenses allowed in each city district. These caps do not close stores outright. Instead, the number of retailers falls slowly as existing shops give up their licenses over time. Little real-world evidence shows whether this approach works, how it changes what is sold, or whether it has unintended effects.
Why it matters
Many cities are looking for ways to reduce smoking and the illness it causes, especially in neighborhoods crowded with tobacco stores. Evidence on how license caps play out in real cities could guide other local governments that are designing similar policies. It could also help them adjust how the policy is carried out, including watching for unintended side effects, so it works better.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Zinzi Bailey
University of Minnesota, MN·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Relate the density of tobacco and e-cigarette stores around schools, and how close they are, to county-level youth e-cigarette use and marketing exposure in Florida, including differences by demographics and racial/ethnic segregation.
Julia Melkers
Arizona State University Campus Immersion, AZ·Education Research
Identify the policy, institutional, structural and cultural factors that enable or block innovation in academic engineering programs during crisis, through comparative case studies in five Research Periphery Countries.
Alex Liber
University of Michigan, MI·Public Health & Epidemiology
Analyze how tobacco regulatory policies perform once implemented, using detailed comparative case studies and policy surveillance that tracks the laws in force across jurisdictions.
The school
Columbia University: 89 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 625 research doctorates a year.
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