Older but Not Wiser- Smokers and Passive Smoking Belief

In recent years the proportion of people who smoke in developed countries has reached a plateau, even though countries like the UK continue to run anti-smoking campaigns. We aim to inform UK policy makers about the effects of anti-smoking campaigns by looking at the beliefs that smokers and non-smokers have about the dangers of passive smoking, with particular interest in whether these beliefs vary amongst smokers of different ages. We envisage two groups of potential smokers. There are the altruists, who are less likely to start to smoke once they are fully aware of the dangers of passive smoking; and there are the non-altruists for whom the effects of passive smoking are an irrelevancy. We hypothesis that anti-smoking campaigns have managed to dissuade the altruists of later generations from ever starting to smoke, but are having no effect on the behavior of the non-altruists and hence the plateau. The older smoking altruists are then captive to their smoking behavior and have to rationalize their smoking behavior by downplaying the effects of passive smoking. Using data from the Health Survey for England we find strong evidence that it is the older smokers who are less prone to believe in the dangers of passive smoking whilst younger smokers essentially have the same beliefs as nonsmokers: a young uneducated smoker is more aware of the dangers of passive smoking than a highly educated older smoker. This conclusion is robust to a number of sensitivity analyses. We conclude that the main effect of current campaigns is the continuing deterrence of potential young altruist smokers.

Discrimination makes me Sick! Establishing a relationship between discrimination and health

The attitudes of the general British population towards Muslims changed post 2001, and this change led to a significant increase in Anti-Muslim discrimination. We use this exogenous attitude change to estimate the causal impact of increased discrimination on a range of objective and subjective health outcomes. The difference-in-differences estimates indicate that discrimination worsens blood pressure, cholesterol, BMI, self-assessed general health, and some dimensions of mental health. Thus, discrimination is a potentially important determinant of the large racial and ethnic health gaps observed in many countries. We also investigate the pathways through which discrimination impacts upon health, and find that discrimination has a negative effect on employment, perceived social support, and health-producing behaviours. Crucially, our results hold for different control groups and model specifications.

COMPSs-Mobile: parallel programming for mobile-cloud computing

The advent of Cloud and the popularization of mobile devices have led us to a shift in computing access. Computing users will have an interaction display while the real computation will be performed remotely, in the Cloud. COMPSs-Mobile is a framework that aims to ease the development of energy-efficient and high-performing applications for this environment. The framework provides an infrastructure-unaware programming model that allows developers to code regular Android applications that, transparently, are parallelized, and partially offloaded to remote resources. This paper gives an overview of the programming model and describes the internal components of the toolkit which supports it focusing on the offloading and checkpointing mechanisms. It also presents the results of some tests conducted to evaluate the behavior of the solution and to measure the potential benefits in Android applications.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

People versus machines in the UK: minimum wages, labor reallocation and automatable jobs

This study follows the Lordan and Neumark (2018)1 analysis for the US, and examines whether minimum wage increases affect employment opportunities in automatable jobs in the UK for low-skilled low-wage workers. Overall, I find that increasing the minimum wage decreases the share of automatable employment held by low-skilled low-wage workers, and increases the likelihood that workers in automatable jobs become dis-employed. On aggregate the effect size is modest, but I also provide evidence that these effects are larger in more recent years. The study also highlights significant heterogeneity by industry and demographic group, including more substantive adverse effects for older low-skilled workers in manufacturing, as well as effects at the intensive margin

The obesity epidemic is spreading more rapidly than expected, but many people don’t even recognise that they are too heavy

Recently, it has been shown that the average Briton exercises far less than is recommended and that obesity is on the rise. Grace Lordan quantifies some of the costs of obesity and some of the obstacles that stand in the way of exercise. Importantly, many overweight individuals do not even recognise that they are overweight, and so perhaps a first step is to begin telling people that they need to lose weight, either through their GP, a national campaign of information or by providing the right kind of incentives to individuals