The Demand For Cigarettes and Restrictions on Smoking in the Workplace

The purpose of this paper is to empirically test the effect that restrictive clean air laws have on the level of smoking. Restrictive clean air laws refers to the laws which prohibit smoking in private workplaces as well as in public places. The data employed in this study consist of a time series of cross sections of the fifty states of the U.S., and Washington D.C., over the time period from 1975 through 1985, Since states where sentiment is strongly against cigarettes are more likely to pass a clean air law, endogeneity between cigarette demand and the clean air law is a problem. A two step estimation model is used to control for endogeneity. Both a single equation and a two equation model of cigarette demand were estimated. The single equation results indicate that a clean air law has a significant negative effect on cigarette demand. However, the two equation model indicates that cigarette demand has a significant negative effect on the probability of passing a clean air law. The results indicate that when endogeneity is controlled for the clean air law dose not have a significant effect on cigarette demand. This does not imply that the enactment of a clean air law would not reduce the level of smoking if such a law were imposed in all states, but rather that only states with low levels of smoking are able to pass restrictive clean sir laws.

Alcohol Control Policies and Motor Vehicle Fatalities

The purpose of this study is to estimate the effects of drunk driving deterrents and other alcohol related policies on drunk driving. The data set employed is an annual time-series of state cross-sections for the 48 contiguous states of the U.S. from 1982 through 1988. Total and alterative alcohol involved motor vehicle fatality rates, for the general population and for 18 to 20 year olds, are used as measures of drunk driving. The results indicate that the moat effective policies are increased beer taxes and mandatory administrative license actions. Maintaining the beer tax at its real 1951 value would have reduced fatalities by 11.5 percent annually, on average, during the sample period. A mandatory administrative license sanction of one year would have reduced fatalities by 9 percent. The next most effective policies are a 21 year old legal drinking age, preliminary breath test and dram shop laws and relatively large mandatory fines. These policies each reduce total fatalities by about 5 to 6 percent. No plea bargaining provisions and mandatory license sanctions upon conviction are also found to have some deterrent effect. Other drunk driving laws tested include mandatory jail sentences and community service options, illegal per se laws, and open container laws. None of these were found to have a deterrent effect on drunk driving.

Effects of Alcohol Price Policy on Youth

In this paper we summarize research that deals with the effects of alcoholic beverage prices and excise taxes on a variety of outcomes for youth. These include alcohol consumption, excessive consumption, motor vehicle accident mortality, and college completion rates. The research employs six nationally representative data sets on individuals that span the period from 1974 through 1989 and two state level data sets for the years 1975-1981 and 19821988. The studies find that alcohol use and motor vehicle accident mortality are negatively related to the cost of alcohol. College completion rates are positively related to this variable. Clearly, these are policy-relevant findings since price is a policy-manipulable variable. Frequently, the effects of a variety of simulated excise tax hikes exceed those of the uniform minimum legal drinking age of 21 in all states.

Advertising Bans and the Substitutability of Online and Offline Advertising

The authors examine whether the growth of the Internet has reduced the effectiveness of government regulation of advertising. They combine nonexperimental variation in local regulation of offline alcohol advertising with data from field tests that randomized exposure to online advertising for 275 different online advertising campaigns to 61,580 people. The results show that people are 8% less likely to say that they will purchase an alcoholic beverage in states that have alcohol advertising bans compared with states that do not. For consumers exposed to online advertising, this gap narrows to 3%. There are similar effects for four changes in local offline alcohol advertising restrictions when advertising effectiveness is observed both before and after the change. The effect of online advertising is disproportionately high for new products and for products with low awareness in places that have bans. This suggests that online advertising could reduce the effectiveness of attempts to regulate offline advertising channels because online advertising substitutes for (rather than complements) offline advertising.Google (Firm)WPP (Firm

Dehydration of subducting slow-spread oceanic lithosphere in the Lesser Antilles

Subducting slabs carry water into the mantle and are a major gateway in the global geochemical water cycle. Fluid transport and release can be constrained with seismological data. Here we use joint active-source/local-earthquake seismic tomography to derive unprecedented constraints on multi-stage fluid release from subducting slow-spread oceanic lithosphere. We image the low P-wave velocity crustal layer on the slab top and show that it disappears beneath 60–100 km depth, marking the depth of dehydration metamorphism and eclogitization. Clustering of seismicity at 120–160 km depth suggests that the slab’s mantle dehydrates beneath the volcanic arc, and may be the main source of fluids triggering arc magma generation. Lateral variations in seismic properties on the slab surface suggest that serpentinized peridotite exhumed in tectonized slow-spread crust near fracture zones may increase water transport to sub-arc depths. This results in heterogeneous water release and directly impacts earthquakes generation and mantle wedge dynamics

Parasite fate and involvement of infected cells in the induction of CD4+ and CD8+ T cell responses to Toxoplasma gondii

During infection with the intracellular parasite Toxoplasma gondii, the presentation of parasite-derived antigens to CD4+ and CD8+ T cells is essential for long-term resistance to this pathogen. Fundamental questions remain regarding the roles of phagocytosis and active invasion in the events that lead to the processing and presentation of parasite antigens. To understand the most proximal events in this process, an attenuated non-replicating strain of T. gondii (the cpsII strain) was combined with a cytometry-based approach to distinguish active invasion from phagocytic uptake. In vivo studies revealed that T. gondii disproportionately infected dendritic cells and macrophages, and that infected dendritic cells and macrophages displayed an activated phenotype characterized by enhanced levels of CD86 compared to cells that had phagocytosed the parasite, thus suggesting a role for these cells in priming naïve T cells. Indeed, dendritic cells were required for optimal CD4+ and CD8+ T cell responses, and the phagocytosis of heat-killed or invasion-blocked parasites was not sufficient to induce T cell responses. Rather, the selective transfer of cpsII-infected dendritic cells or macrophages (but not those that had phagocytosed the parasite) to naïve mice potently induced CD4+ and CD8+ T cell responses, and conferred protection against challenge with virulent T. gondii. Collectively, these results point toward a critical role for actively infected host cells in initiating T. gondii-specific CD4+ and CD8+ T cell responses