Sex, Teen Pregnancies, STDs, and Beer Prices: Empirical Evidence from Canada

We evaluate the effects of higher beer prices on gonorrhea, chlamydia, and teen pregnancy rates by pooling data across Canadian provinces over time. Higher real beer prices are significantly correlated with a reduction in both gonorrhea and chlamydia rates with price elasticities ranging from -0.6 to -1.4. In contrast, an increase in the minimum legal drinking age is significantly associated with a reduction in teen pregnancies as well as births. Finally, Instrumental Variables (IV) estimates from the 1996 National Population Health Surveys (NPHS) validate that increased alcohol consumption is correlated with risky sexual practices, and ultimately with an increased likelihood of being infected with a sexually transmitted disease (STD).

Estimating Price Elasticities When there is Smuggling: The Sensitivity of Smoking to Price in Canada

A central parameter for evaluating tax policies is the price elasticity of demand for cigarettes. But in many countries this parameter is difficult to estimate reliably due to widespread smuggling, which significantly biases estimates using legal sales data. An excellent example is Canada, where widespread smuggling in the early 1990s, in response to large tax increases, biases upwards the response of legal cigarette sales to price. We surmount this problem through two approaches: excluding the provinces and years where smuggling was greatest; and using household level expenditure data on smoking, where there is a downward bias to estimated elasticities from smuggling. These two approaches yield a tightly estimated elasticity in the range of -0.45 to -0.47. We also show that the sensitivity of smoking to price is much larger among lower income Canadians. In the context of recent behavioral models of smoking, whereby higher taxes reduce unwanted smoking among price sensitive populations, this finding suggests that cigarette taxes may not be as regressive as previously suggested. Finally, we show that price increases on cigarettes do not increase, and may actually decrease, consumption of alcohol; as a result, smuggling of cigarettes may have raised consumption of alcohol as well.

Inhibition of spread of typical bipartite and genuine multiparty entanglement in response to quenched disorder

The distribution of entanglement of typical multiparty quantum states is not uniform over the range of the measure utilized for quantifying the entanglement. We intend to find the response of quenched disorder in the state parameters on this non-uniformity for typical states. We find that the typical entanglement, quenched averaged over the disorder, is taken farther away from uniformity, as quantified by decreased standard deviation, in comparison to the clean case. The feature is seemingly generic, as we see it for Gaussian and non-Gaussian disorder distributions, for varying strengths of the disorder, and for disorder insertions in one and several state parameters. The non-Gaussian distributions considered are uniform and Cauchy-Lorentz. Two- and three-qubit pure state Haar-uniform generations are considered for the typical state productions. We also consider noisy versions of the initial states produced in the Haar-uniform generations. A genuine multiparty entanglement monotone is considered for the three-qubit case, while concurrence is used to measure two-qubit entanglement

The power to pass on taxes: a test for tax shifting based on observables

Since gasoline has a relatively inelastic demand, raising government revenue via gasoline taxes could appear appropriate as it entails a relatively small deadweight loss. However, gasoline retail is generally a highly concentrated market, hence the assumption of perfect competition when considering tax incidence might be misleading. Theoretically, in oligopolistic markets taxes can be shifted forward less (more) than proportionally to retail prices; a possibility usually denoted by undershifting (overshifting). Generally, this depends on unobservable parameters of the demand and cost functions. In this paper we device a novel empirical test, based on observables, to assess whether taxes are under- or overshifted in an oligopolistic market. The test depends on the interaction between market structure and taxes. We apply our test to the Canadian retail gasoline market using a panel data set of 10 cities, finding that gasoline taxes are undershifted

Shared purity and concurrence of a mixture of ground and low-lying excited states as indicators of quantum phase transitions

We investigate the efficacy of shared purity, a measure of quantum correlation that is independent of the separability-entanglement paradigm, as a quantum phase transition indicator in comparison with concurrence, a bipartite entanglement measure. The order parameters are investigated for thermal states, pseudo-thermal states and more, of the systems considered. In the case of the one-dimensional $J_1-J_2$ Heisenberg quantum spin model and the one-dimensional transverse-field quantum Ising model, shared purity turns out to be as effective as concurrence in indicating quantum phase transitions. In the two-dimensional $J_1-J_2$ Heisenberg quantum spin model, shared purity indicates the two quantum phase transitions present in the model, while concurrence detects only one of them. Moreover, we find diverging finite-size scaling exponents for the order parameters near the transitions in odd- and even-sized systems governed by the one-dimensional $J_1-J_2$ model, as had previously been reported for quantum spins on odd- and even-legged ladders. It is plausible that the divergence is related to a M{\"o}bius strip-like boundary condition required for odd-sized systems, while for even-sized systems, the usual periodic boundary condition is sufficient.Comment: v2: new considerations added, previous results unchanged, 9 pages, 12 figure

Spread and asymmetry of typical quantum coherence and their inhibition in response to glassy disorder

We consider the average quantum coherences of typical redits and qudits - vectors of real and complex Hilbert spaces - with the analytical forms stemming from the symmetry of Haar-uniformly distributed random pure states. We subsequently study the response to disorder in spread of the typical quantum coherence in response to glassy disorder. The disorder is inserted in the state parameters. Even in the absence of disorder, the quantum coherence distributions of redits and qudits are not uniform over the range of quantum coherence, and the spreads are lower for higher dimensions. On insertion of disorder, the spreads decrease. This decrease in the spread of quantum coherence distribution in response to disorder is seen to be a generic feature of typical pure states: we observe the feature for different strengths of disorder and for various types of disorder distributions, viz. Gaussian, uniform, and Cauchy-Lorentz. We also find that the quantum coherence distributions become less asymmetric with increase in dimension and with infusion of glassy disorder.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figure