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Articles 1 - 13 of 13
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Smoking Bans And Air Quality: Reply, Michael L. Marlow
Anatomy Of Public Health Research: Tobacco Control As A Case Study, Michael L. Marlow
Anatomy Of Public Health Research: Tobacco Control As A Case Study, Michael L. Marlow
Economics
Tobacco is unhealthy, and apparently it is not hard to convince people that government programs are somehow not only effective but necessary to reduce smoking. Early efforts were successful because they focused on raising prices through tax hikes. Then smoking bans became the focus. Bans have so far been imposed on restaurants and bars in 27 states and Washington, D.C., and it is argued that they will change social norms in ways that lower smoking. Spending programs represent a more recent strategy, and these are the focus of this commentary. State governments fund antismoking advertisements that run in newspapers and …
Epidemiologic And Economic Research, And The Question Of Smoking Bans, Michael L. Marlow
Epidemiologic And Economic Research, And The Question Of Smoking Bans, Michael L. Marlow
Economics
Smoking bans in public places are promoted on the dual basis that they protect the public from “secondhand smoke”— environmental tobacco smoke (ETS), and that bans never harm businesses. Evidence shows that ETS does not pose health risks nearly as large as many ban advocates claim, and that bans do harm some businesses. Unintended and adverse consequences of smoking bans include (1) harm to smokers if they compensate by smoking more intensely; (2) an increase in drunk driving when smokers drive longer distances to smoke and drink; and (3) less innovation in air-filtration technology that also slows progress in removing …
Is The Cdc Blowing Smoke?, Michael L. Marlow
Is The Cdc Blowing Smoke?, Michael L. Marlow
Economics
In 2007, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report detailing "best practice" spending recommendations for state tobacco control programs. According to the report, "Research shows that the more states spend on comprehensive tobacco control programs, the greater the reductions in smoking-- and the longer states invest in such programs, the greater and faster the impact.
A Solution To Proebsting's Paradox, Or "How To Skim A Bettor If You Must", Eduardo Zambrano
A Solution To Proebsting's Paradox, Or "How To Skim A Bettor If You Must", Eduardo Zambrano
Economics
Proebsting's Paradox is an argument that appears to show that the betting rule known as the Kelly criterion can lead a bettor to risk an arbitrarily high proportion of his wealth on the outcome of a single event. In this paper I show that a large class of betting criteria, including fractional Kelly, also suffer from the same shortcoming and use standard tools from microeconomic theory to explain why this is so. I also derive a new criterion, dubbed the doubly conservative criterion, that is immune to the problem identified above. Immunity stems from the bettor's attitudes towards capital preservation …
The Credibility Problem In Politics: Theory And Evidence From State-Level Abortion Legislation, Francisco Rodriguez, Eduardo Zambrano
The Credibility Problem In Politics: Theory And Evidence From State-Level Abortion Legislation, Francisco Rodriguez, Eduardo Zambrano
Economics
This paper proposes a simple mechanism for evaluating the relevance of credibility problems in politics. If parties are capable of making credible policy promises, we will not expect them to systematically adopt platforms that entail large probabilities of losing an election. This is because the adoption of very extreme platforms has the effect of shifting expected policies away from their ideal points. Parties who lack the capacity of making credible commitments, in turn, are unable to affect voters' expectations of the policies they will adopt upon reaching office. We test these predictions on a panel of US states by studying …
Vertical Restraints And Horizontal Control, Robert Innes, Stephen F. Hamilton
Vertical Restraints And Horizontal Control, Robert Innes, Stephen F. Hamilton
Economics
This article considers vertical restraints in a setting in which duopoly retailers each sell more than one manufactured good. Vertical restraints by a dominant manufacturer enable the firm to acquire horizontal control over a competitively supplied retail good. The equilibrium contracts produce symptoms that are consistent with a variety of observed retail practices, including slotting fees paid to retailers by competitive suppliers, loss leadership, and predatory accommodation with below-cost manufacturer pricing for the dominant brand(s). Applications are developed for supermarket retailing, where the manufacturer of a national brand seeks to control the retail pricing of a supermarket's private label, and …
Excise Taxes With Multiproduct Transactions, Stephen F. Hamilton
Excise Taxes With Multiproduct Transactions, Stephen F. Hamilton
Economics
I examine excise taxes levied on multiproduct retailers. Excise taxes reduce equilibrium output and decrease equilibrium product variety in the short run, but taxes can raise output per product in the long run and induce entry. Excise taxes are overshifted into prices in a wide range of cases, including under linear and concave demand conditions, and excise taxes shift less than one-for-one into prices only when demand is highly convex. Multiproduct transactions substantively alter the efficiency of ad valorem and specific forms of excise taxes and affect the comparison of relative tax performance over short-run and long-run time horizons.
Informative Advertising In Differentiated Oligopoly Markets, Stephen F. Hamilton
Informative Advertising In Differentiated Oligopoly Markets, Stephen F. Hamilton
Economics
This paper examines the welfare implications of informative advertising in differentiated product oligopoly markets. The analysis reconciles the conflicting results in previous studies that find advertising to be undersupplied in homogeneous product markets, but oversupplied in differentiated product markets when the degree of differentiation is "small". In equilibrium, purely informative advertising is undersupplied when brands are sufficiently close substitutes and oversupplied when brands are more differentiated. Product differentiation also has welfare implications for the effect of technological change in the advertising sector. In response to an advertising cost innovation, equilibrium prices fall and the market converges to the socially optimal …
Unintended Consequences: The Spillover Effects Of Common Property Regulations, Gordon Rausser, Stephen F. Hamilton, Marty Covach, Ryan Stifter
Unintended Consequences: The Spillover Effects Of Common Property Regulations, Gordon Rausser, Stephen F. Hamilton, Marty Covach, Ryan Stifter
Economics
The closure of the Hawaiian longline swordfish fishery over the period 2001–2004, which was motivated by the protection of endangered sea turtles, created the elements of a natural experiment that allows identification of the market transfer of catch (and sea turtle bycatch) to other regions. This paper exploits the fact that the vessels in the Hawaiian longline fishery sell their catch in the US fresh swordfish market to analyze the pattern of changes in US fresh and frozen swordfish consumption both before and after the closure regulation was imposed. The mechanisms by which any unintended consequences on endangered sea turtles …
Commentary On "Efficient Inflation Targets For Distorted Dynamic Economies, Eric O'N. Fisher
Commentary On "Efficient Inflation Targets For Distorted Dynamic Economies, Eric O'N. Fisher
Economics
No abstract provided.
Rent-To-Own Agreements: Customer Characteristics And Contract Outcomes, Michael H. Anderson, Sanjiv Jaggia
Rent-To-Own Agreements: Customer Characteristics And Contract Outcomes, Michael H. Anderson, Sanjiv Jaggia
Economics
The rent-to-own (RTO) industry, by offering immediate access to household goods for a small periodic fee with no credit check or down payment, has strong appeal to low income and financially distressed consumers. An important policy question is whether an RTO agreement is used as a rental/lease with build-in purchase option or as something more akin to an installment loan. Given the embedded options to return the item or to purchase it early, the actual rent paid by RTO customers is substantially lower than the oft-reported total rent which assumes that agreements go to term. We employ a log-normal censored …
Modelling Skewness And Elongation In Financial Returns: The Case Of Exchange-Traded Funds, Sanjiv Jaggia, Alison Kelly-Hawke
Modelling Skewness And Elongation In Financial Returns: The Case Of Exchange-Traded Funds, Sanjiv Jaggia, Alison Kelly-Hawke
Economics
Recent studies have documented the importance of asymmetry and tail-fatness of returns on portfolio-choice, asset-pricing, value-at-risk and option-valuation models. This article explores the nature of skewness and elongation in daily Exchange-traded Fund (ETF) return distributions using g, h and (g x h) distributions. These exploratory data analytic techniques of Tukey (1977) reveal patterns that are hidden from a cursory glance at conventional measures for skewness and elongation. The g, h and (g x h) distributions provide parameter estimates that indicate substantial variation in skewness and elongation for individual ETFs; nonetheless, some trends are discovered …