Date and Time Tags for Filenames in WinXX

I receive several (ir)regular deliveries of data files for the on-going development of a panel data set. Both the delivering agency systems and the targets of our research group change over time -- by the hour and/or by the year. I need to be able to identify from the filenames which Stata .dta files were created with which.do files leaving which .log files. I use the Stata shell facility and DOS rename to attach an ado generated global macro date-tag and global macro hour-minute-tag.

Unintended Consequences? Welfare Reform and the Working Poor

We have used a unique longitudinal database that incorporates information from diverse administrative and research sources to examine the impact of the early stages of welfare reform on poor working families who do not receive cash assistance. Our data are for 2791 working poor families from March 1996 through February 1997. Using a number of different estimation techniques, we find that the impact of the simultaneous October 1996 implementation of welfare reform and a federal minimum wage increase was to lower the earnings of the working poor families in our sample by approximately 6%. We find that increases in funding for Child Care Subsidies associated with welfare reform led to a significant increase in earnings. On net, the increase in Child Care Subsidies and the decrease in earnings because of the October 1996 changes approximately cancel out, with the representative family in our sample experiencing an estimated monthly earnings change of between -$18 and$68, with an earnings gain of $25 being most likely.

Criminal Deterrence: Revisiting the Issue with a Birth Cohort

In this paper, we estimate the general deterrent effect of criminal justice resources on criminal behavior. Our panel data, which combine individual-level information on arrests and personal characteristics with aggregate measures of criminal justice resources, allow us to obtain deterrence measures that more closely reflect theoretical concepts and are of potential policy relevance. We find robust evidence of a general deterrent effect in our estimates of error components probit and Tobit models.

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Criminal Deterrence: Revisiting the Issue with a Birth Cohort.

We estimate the general deterrent effect of criminal justice resources on criminal behavior using panel data for a sample representative of young men in U.S. urban areas. Our data, which combine individual-level information on arrests and personal characteristics with aggregate information on criminal justice resources, allow us to obtain deterrence measures that reflect theoretical concepts and are of potential policy relevance. We find robust evidence of a general deterrent effect flowing from criminal justice, particularly police, resources. The nature of our data also allows us to conduct extensive exogeneity tests and to explore a number of possible 'third causes' for the deterrent effect. We find strong evidence that our deterrence variables are exogenous and no evidence that our deterrence result stems from commonly hypothesized third causes. Copyright 1994 by MIT Press.