Substance abuse treatment: what do we know? an economist's perspective

The substance abuse treatment literature has basically dealt with four important questions: 1) Is treatment effective? 2) Are all programs equally effective? 3) why do programs differ in their effectiveness? and 4) which treatments are most cost-effective?. This paper reviews the substance abuse literature around these four questions

Dollars and Performance: Treating Alcohol Misuse in Maine

If public funds are allocated efficiently, then an increase in funding should improve the performance of substance abuse treatment programs. In the data used in this paper, performance (measured as abstinence rates) and expenditures per patient are not positively correlated. One explanation is that funding is endogeneous, i.e. programs treating more difficult patients receive more funding. The data comes from all Maine´s outp/atient drug-free programs that received public funding between 1991 and 1994. After controlling for endogeneity, this paper concludes that the marginal impact of expenditures per patient on abstinence rates is small and statistically insignificantly different from zero.Publicad

A consistent estimator for the binomial distribution in the presence of "incidental parameters": an application to patent data

In this paper a consistent estimator for the Binomial distribution in the presence of incidental parameters, or fixed effects, when the underlying probability is a logistic function is derived. The consistent estimator is obtained from the maximization of a conditional likelihood function in light of Andersen's work. Monte Carlo simulations show its superiority relative to the traditional maximum likelihood estimator with fixed effects also in small samples, particularly when the number of observations in each cross-section, T, is small. Finally, this new estimator is applied to an original dataset that allows the estimation of the probability of obtaining a patent

SUBSTANCE ABUSE TREATMENT: WHAT DO WE KNOW? AN ECONOMIST’S PERSPECTIVE

The substance abuse treatment literature has basically dealt with four important questions: 1) Is treatment effective? 2) Are all programs equally effective? 3) why do programs differ in their effectiveness? and 4) which treatments are most cost-effective?. This paper reviews the substance abuse literature around these four questions.

Inelastic quarkonium photoproduction in coherent hadron - hadron interactions at LHC energies

In this paper we study the inelastic quarkonium photoproduction in coherent $pp/pPb/PbPb$ interactions. Considering the ultra relativistic hadrons as a source of photons, we estimate the total $h_1 + h_2 \rightarrow h \otimes V + X$ ($V = J/\Psi$ and $\Upsilon$) cross sections and rapidity distributions at LHC energies. Our results demonstrate that the experimental analysis of this process can be used to understand the underlying mechanism governing heavy quarkonium production.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, 3 table

Diffractive photoproduction of Z^0 bosons in coherent interactions at CERN-LHC

The exclusive $Z^0$ photoproduction at high energies in $\gamma p (A)$, $p p$ and $AA$ collisions is investigate within the color dipole formalism. We generalize the description of the deeply virtual compton scattering (DVCS) process, which describe quite well the HERA data, for the production of $Z^0$ bosons and estimate the total cross section for the exclusive process $\gamma^* h\to Z^0 h$ ($h=p,A$) for different energies, photon virtualities and atomic numbers. As hadrons at collider energies are a source of Weizs\"{a}cker - Williams photons, we consider electromagnetic interactions in hadron-hadron collisions at Tevatron and LHC energies and estimate the rapidity distribution and total cross section for $Z^0$ production in the $h h\to h Z^0 h$ process. This is the first estimation for such a process in literature. It can allow us to study, for instance, the physics of hadronic $Z^0$ decays in a clean environment characterized by two rapidity gaps. Our results indicate that the experimental analyzes of this process could be feasible in $pp$ but the physics scenario for $AA$ collisions is not promising.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, 1 table; The erroneus additional factor of $2\pi$ in the normalization of the cross sections is removed. Figures and table are update

Momentum and energy propagation in tapered granular chains

We study momentum and energy propagation in 1D tapered chains of spherical granules which interact according to a Hertz potential. In this work we apply the binary collision approximation, which is based on the assumption that transfer of energy along the chain occurs via a succession of two-particle collisions. Although the binary theory correctly captures the trends of increase or decrease of kinetic energy and momentum, the actual values of these quantities are not in good quantitative agreement with those obtained by numerically integrating the full equations of motion. To address this difficulty we have developed a mixed numerical/analytical correction algorithm to provide an improved estimate of the velocity of the particles during pulse propagation. With this corrected velocity we are in turn able to correctly predict the momentum and kinetic energy along the chain for several tapering configurations, specifically for forward linear, forward exponential, backward linear and backward exponential tapering