Taxing Snack Foods: What to Expect for Diet and Tax Revenues

Health researchers and health policy advocates have proposed levying excise taxes on snack foods as a possible way to address the growing prevalence of obesity and overweight in the United States. Some proposals suggest higher prices alone will change consumers' diets. Others claim that change will be possible if earmarked taxes are used to fund an information program. This research examines the potential impact of excise taxes on snack foods, using baseline data from a household survey of food purchases. To illustrate likely impacts, we examine how much salty snack purchases might be reduced under varying excise tax rates and possible consumer price responses. We find that relatively low tax rates of 1 cent per pound and 1 percent of value would not appreciably alter consumption - and, thus, would have little effect on diet quality or health outcomes - but would generate $40-$100 million in tax revenues.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Public Economics,

Kinetic characterization of selective peroxisome-proliferator-activated receptor gamma modulators in vitro

Background: The ligand-activated transcription factor, peroxisome-proliferator-activated receptor gamma (PPARγ), has been shown to play an essential role in immunosuppression during sepsis. PPARγ is upregulated in T cells of septic patients, sensitizing these cells to PPARγ-dependent apoptosis and thus contributing to T-cell depletion. In the polymicrobial cecum ligation and puncture (CLP) sepsis model in mice, both T-cell-specific gene knockout (Lck-Cre PPARγfl/fl) and systemic pharmacological PPARγ antagonism by GW9662 improved survival. Because GW9662 was only effective when applied 3 hours after CLP, we were interested to extend this time frame. For this reason we characterized the kinetics of SPPARγMs when administered before or in combination with the agonist thiazolidinedione, rosiglitazone. Methods: A PPARγ-dependent transactivation assay was used in HEK293T cells. It is based on the vector pFA-PPARγ-LBD-GAL4-DBD encoding the hybrid protein PPARγ-LBD-GAL4-DBD and the reporter vector pFR-Luc, carrying a GAL4-responsive element in front of the Firefly luciferase gene. These two vectors were co-transfected, in combination with a control vector encoding Renilla luciferase (pRL-CMV) to normalize Firefly luciferase activity for transfection efficiency. Following transfection, cells were incubated with the SPPARγMs F-MOC and MCC-555 and the PPARγ antagonist GW9662 for different times (2 to 48 hours) and at increasing doses (0.01 to 10 μM), with or without rosiglitazone (0.01 to 10 μM). Transactivation was analyzed using a 96-well plate format. Results: Rosiglitazone transactivated PPARγ in a time-dependent and dose-dependent manner, the response gradually increasing to a maximum at 48 hours with 10 μM. Low concentrations (0.01 to 0.1 μM) of SPPARγMs F-MOC and MCC-555 and the PPARγ antagonist GW9662 all exerted dose-independent antagonistic effects at an early incubation time point (2 hours). From 10 hours onwards, MCC-555 and GW9662, given alone, both exerted PPARγ agonistic effects, MCC-555 in parallel to responses to rosiglitazone, but GW9662 with characteristics of partial antagonism. F-MOC showed no dose-dependent effect at any concentration at later time points. Only GW9662 (1 to 10 μM) was able to inhibit rosiglitazone (0.1 to 1 μM)-induced PPARγ transactivation after 10 hours. Conclusion: Our kinetic analysis reveals clear differences in the modulatory characteristics of PPARγ inhibitors, with previously unreported early inhibitory effects and late agonistic or partial agonistic activity. New SPPARγMs with extended inhibitory activity may prove useful in the therapy of sepsis

Social Networks and Housing Markets

The recent house price experiences within an individual’s social network affect her perceptions of the attractiveness of property investments, and through this channel have large effects on her housing market activity. Our data combine anonymized social network information from Facebook with housing transaction data and a survey. We first show that in the survey, individuals whose geographically-distant friends experienced larger recent house price increases consider local property a more attractive investment, with bigger effects for individuals who regularly discuss such investments with their friends. Based on these findings, we introduce a new methodology to document large effects of housing market expectations on individual housing investment decisions and aggregate housing market outcomes. Our approach exploits plausibly-exogenous variation in the recent house price experiences of individuals’ geographically-distant friends as shifters of those individuals’ local housing market expectations. Individuals whose friends experienced a 5 percentage points larger house price increase over the previous 24 months (i) are 3.1 percentage points more likely to transition from renting to owning over a two-year period, (ii) buy a 1.7 percent larger house, (iii) pay 3.3 percent more for a given house, and (iv) make a 7% larger downpayment. Similarly, when homeowners’ friends experience less positive house price changes, these homeowners are more likely to become renters, and more likely to sell their property at a lower price. We also find that when individuals observe a higher dispersion of house price experiences across their friends, this has a negative effect on their housing investments. Finally, we show that these individual-level responses aggregate up to affect county-level house prices and trading volume. Our findings suggest that the house price experiences of geographically-distant friends might provide a valid instrument for local house price growth

Context-Aware UPnP-AV Services for Adaptive Home Multimedia Systems

Recommended by Harald Kosch One possibility to provide mobile multimedia in domestic multimedia systems is the use of Universal Plug and Play Audio Visual (UPnP-AV) devices. In a standard UPnP-AV scenario, multimedia content provided by a Media Server device is streamed to Media Renderer devices by the initiation of a Control Point. However, there is no provisioning of context-aware multimedia content customization. This paper presents an enhancement of standard UPnP-AV services for home multimedia environments regarding context awareness. It comes up with context profile definitions, shows how this context information can be queried from the Media Renderers, and illustrates how a Control Point can use this information to tailor a media stream from the Media Server to one or more Media Renderers. Moreover, since a standard Control Point implementation only queries one Media Server at a time, there is no global view on the content of all Media Servers in the UPnP-AV network. This paper also presents an approach of multimedia content integration on the Media Server side that provides fast search for content on the network. Finally, a number of performance measurements show the overhead costs of our enhancements to UPnP-AV in order to achieve the benefits

Flow cytometry-based FRET identifies binding intensities in PPAR[gamma]1 protein-protein interactions in living cells

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Biogenesis of a novel compartment for autophagosome-mediated unconventional protein secretion

A novel membrane structure called CUPS is assembled during the secretion of unconventional cargo such as Acb1

A Boost in the Paycheck: Survey Evidence on Workers’ Response to the 2011 Payroll Tax Cuts

This paper presents new survey evidence on workers' response to the 2011 payroll tax cuts. While workers intended to spend 10 to 18 percent of their tax-cut income, they reported actually spending 28 to 43 percent of the funds. This is higher than estimates from studies of recent tax cuts, and arguably a consequence of the design of the 2011 tax cuts. The shift to greater consumption than intended is largely unexplained by presentbias or unanticipated shocks, and is likely a consequence of mental accounting. We also use data from a complementary survey to understand the heterogeneous tax-cut response

The Precision nEDM Measurement with UltraCold Neutrons at TRIUMF

The TRIUMF Ultra-Cold Advanced Neutron (TUCAN) collaboration aims at a precision neutron electric dipole moment (nEDM) measurement with an uncertainty of $10^{-27}\,e\cdot\mathrm{cm}$, which is an order-of-magnitude better than the current nEDM upper limit and enables us to test Supersymmetry. To achieve this precision, we are developing a new high-intensity ultracold neutron (UCN) source using super-thermal UCN production in superfluid helium (He-II) and a nEDM spectrometer. The current development status of them is reported in this article.Comment: Proceedings of the 24th International Spin Symposium (SPIN 2021), 18-22 October 2021, Matsue, Japa