The Incidence of Tobacco Taxation: Evidence from Geographic Micro-Level Data

This paper uses a recent increase in Wisconsin’s tobacco tax as a natural experiment to measure the economic incidence of tobacco taxation, using micro-level data on cigarette prices from retail locations in Wisconsin and states that share its border. We find that Wisconsin’s $1 tobacco tax increase was over-shifted to consumers; they pay the entire amount of the tax as well as a premium of between 8–17 cents per pack of cigarettes. We also use geo-coded data to test if the incidence of the tobacco tax is different for locations near the border of states with different tobacco taxation

A Proposal for an NYPD Inspector General

This report focuses on oversight of the NYPD's intelligence operations. Although a number of substantive legal rules set the boundaries of these types of programs, history has shown that it is exceedingly difficult to ensure that intelligence agencies adhere to these limits. Intelligence gathering, by its very nature, is clandestine and details of operations often cannot be publicly revealed. And while law enforcement agencies should be proactive in their approach to crime and terrorism, broad powers to collect intelligence in pursuit of these goals can, and have historically, bled into abuse

Incidence and Salience of Alcohol Taxes: Do Consumers Overreact?

We use a unique, geocoded micro data set of retail prices to estimate the incidence of alcohol taxation. We estimate the pass-through of alcohol taxation employing both standard ordinary least squares (OLS) and a regression discontinuity design (RDD), using the abrupt change in excise tax occurring at state borders for identification. Our results show that sales and excise taxes on alcohol have different effects on final consumer price. Our estimates suggest that while 40 percent to 50 percent of sales taxes are passed on to consumers, excise taxes have a negative pass-through rate. Negative rates of pass-through on the excise portion of the alcohol tax are likely the result of consumers overreacting to the tax compared to how they would react to a general price increase, or that the alcohol tax is quite salient for consumers. This effect is particularly strong in areas near state borders when using the RDD estimation strategy

Bufo microscaphus

Number of Pages: 3Integrative BiologyGeological Science

A Fast Parameterized Algorithm for Co-Path Set

The k-CO-PATH SET problem asks, given a graph G and a positive integer k, whether one can delete k edges from G so that the remainder is a collection of disjoint paths. We give a linear-time fpt algorithm with complexity O^*(1.588^k) for deciding k-CO-PATH SET, significantly improving the previously best known O^*(2.17^k) of Feng, Zhou, and Wang (2015). Our main tool is a new O^*(4^{tw(G)}) algorithm for CO-PATH SET using the Cut&Count framework, where tw(G) denotes treewidth. In general graphs, we combine this with a branching algorithm which refines a 6k-kernel into reduced instances, which we prove have bounded treewidth