Addiction and Smoking Behaviour in Italy

Since the end of the eighties the Becker and Murphy model of rational addiction has been the dominant approach to estimate addiction e ects. The main implication of the model is that public policy, in principle, should not interfere with a fully rational behaviour. However, the additional public health care costs smokers impose on non smokers could be internalised using price mechanisms, as the long run price elasticity of demand is supposed to be, according to this model, significantly higher than the short run one and higher than that obtained from alternative models of addiction, such as the habit persistence model. In this paper we estimate the demand for Tobacco and related products in Italy using PANEL data supplied by ISTAT for the twenty Italian regions. The rational addiction model is used to estimate addiction e ects following the methodological approach suggested by Baltagi and Levin (2001). The myopic addiction model is also estimated as an alternative way of modelling addiction e ects. These data seem to support the rational addiction model, although the results are not clearcut. We have thus estimated the same models using Time Series of per-capita Households Tobacco expenditures from the Italian National Accounts. In this case, the data strongly support the Rational Addiction model and produce elasticities in line with similar case studies.

The Economic Impact of Clean Indoor Air Laws: A Review of Alternative Approaches and of Empirical findings

This paper surveys existing approaches and empirical results to estimating the impact of Clean Indoor Air Laws on smoking behaviour, on the one hand, and on the hospitality industry, on the other. The purpose is twofold: first, identifying important gaps, if any, in the literature that could be addressed in future research; second, trying to unfold the reasons of the wide heterogeneity in the results and, as a consequence, to provide an assessment of the reliability of those results. The discussion begins with a look at the recent regulations that motivate the study of the impact of Clean Indoor Air Laws, with a special emphasis on European smoking bans. This is followed by critical reviews of studies and approaches to estimating the economic impact of Clean Indoor Air Laws. We can distinguish between a direct and an indirect effect of anti-smoking regulations: the direct effect on smoking behaviour and the indirect effect on the economic performance of the hospitality industry. The first review assesses those studies and approaches that have focused on the direct impact on smoking behaviour. The second review analyzes estimation of the economic impact on the hospitality industry. At the end of each of the two broad reviews, we summarize a selection of the empirical findings. The fifth section explores methodological differences and problems that may affect the empirical analysis reviewed in the previous sections with the purpose of shedding light on the wide heterogeneity in the empirical findings. The concluding section asks whether the studies reviewed in this paper place us in a better position to assess the economic impact of Clean Indoor Air Lawssmoking bans, smoking participation, smoking consumption

Towards Reversible Sessions

In this work, we incorporate reversibility into structured communication-based programming, to allow parties of a session to automatically undo, in a rollback fashion, the effect of previously executed interactions. This permits taking different computation paths along the same session, as well as reverting the whole session and starting a new one. Our aim is to define a theoretical basis for examining the interplay in concurrent systems between reversible computation and session-based interaction. We thus enrich a session-based variant of pi-calculus with memory devices, dedicated to keep track of the computation history of sessions in order to reverse it. We discuss our initial investigation concerning the definition of a session type discipline for the proposed reversible calculus, and its practical advantages for static verification of safe composition in communication-centric distributed software performing reversible computations.Comment: In Proceedings PLACES 2014, arXiv:1406.331

A standard-driven communication protocol for disconnected clinics in rural areas

The importance of the Electronic Health Record (EHR), which stores all healthcare-related data belonging to a patient, has been recognized in recent years by governments, institutions, and industry. Initiatives like Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) have been developed for the definition of standard methodologies for secure and interoperable EHR exchanges among clinics and hospitals. Using the requisites specified by these initiatives, many large-scale projects have been set up to enable healthcare professionals to handle patients' EHRs. Applications deployed in these settings are often considered safety-critical, thus ensuring such security properties as confidentiality, authentication, and authorization is crucial for their success. In this paper, we propose a communication protocol, based on the IHE specifications, for authenticating healthcare professionals and assuring patients' safety in settings where no network connection is available, such as in rural areas of some developing countries. We define a specific threat model, driven by the experience of use cases covered by international projects, and prove that an intruder cannot cause damages to the safety of patients and their data by performing any of the attacks falling within this threat model. To demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our protocol, we have fully implemented it

On Properties of Policy-Based Specifications

The advent of large-scale, complex computing systems has dramatically increased the difficulties of securing accesses to systems' resources. To ensure confidentiality and integrity, the exploitation of access control mechanisms has thus become a crucial issue in the design of modern computing systems. Among the different access control approaches proposed in the last decades, the policy-based one permits to capture, by resorting to the concept of attribute, all systems' security-relevant information and to be, at the same time, sufficiently flexible and expressive to represent the other approaches. In this paper, we move a step further to understand the effectiveness of policy-based specifications by studying how they permit to enforce traditional security properties. To support system designers in developing and maintaining policy-based specifications, we formalise also some relevant properties regarding the structure of policies. By means of a case study from the banking domain, we present real instances of such properties and outline an approach towards their automatised verification.Comment: In Proceedings WWV 2015, arXiv:1508.0338

A symbolic semantics for a clculus for service-oriented computing

We introduce a symbolic characterisation of the operational semantics of COWS, a formal language for specifying and combining service-oriented applications, while modelling their dynamic behaviour. This alternative semantics avoids infinite representations of COWS terms due to the value-passing nature of communication in COWS and is more amenable for automatic manipulation by analytical tools, such as e.g. equivalence and model checkers. We illustrate our approach through a ‘translation service’ scenario

Equivalence Scales Declining with Expenditure: Evidence and Implications for Income Distribution

We estimate expenditure dependent equivalence scales for Italian couples with and without children. Following Donaldson and Pendakur (2006) we incorporate the generalized absolute equivalence-scale exactness (GAESE) restrictions into a translated quadratic almost ideal (TQAI) demand system. We obtain declining with expenditure scales, a pattern that tends to strengthen when the number of children increases. This implies that scale economies in current consumption are lower for families with poor expenditure capacities. We also show that families living in the South and the Islands suffer a substantial additional cost to achieve, ceteris paribus, the same well-being of those living in the North. Finally, we find that ignoring the declining with expenditure pattern results in a relevant understatement of measured inequality.Equivalent Expenditure Functions; Equivalence Scales

Addiction and the Interaction between Alcohol and Tobacco Consumption

This paper adopts a multi-commodity habit formation model to study whether unhealthy behaviours are related, i.e. whether there are contemporaneous and inter temporal complementarities in Italian consumption of alcohol and tobacco. Own and crossprice elasticities, as well as the income elasticities, are calculated from the parameters of a semi-reduced system estimated on aggregate annual time series for alcohol and tobacco expenditures over the period 1960-2002. Own price elasticities are negative and tobacco appears to be more responsive than alcohol demand, although both responses are less than unity. Cross price elasticities are also negative and asymmetric showing that alcohol and tobacco are complements. Whereby a ”double dividend” could then be exploited, because public policy needs to tackle the consumption of one good only to control the demand of both. The asymmetry in the values of the cross price elasticities coupled with the relative magnitude of the own price responses suggest that the optimal strategy for maximizing public revenues through increases in ”sin” goods excise taxation would be to raise alcohol taxation more than tobacco. Finally, past consumption of one addictive good does not significantly reinforce current consumption of the other addictive goodaddiction models; sin goods; GMM estimator

COWS: A Timed Service-Oriented Calculus

COWS (Calculus for Orchestration of Web Services) is a foundational language for Service Oriented Computing that combines in an original way a number of ingredients borrowed from well-known process calculi, e.g. asynchronous communication, polyadic synchronization, pattern matching, protection, delimited receiving and killing activities, while resulting different from any of them. In this paper, we extend COWS with timed orchestration constructs, this way we obtain a language capable of completely formalizing the semantics of WS-BPEL, the ‘de facto’ standard language for orchestration of web services. We present the semantics of the extended language and illustrate its peculiarities and expressiveness by means of several examples

e-Health for Rural Areas in Developing Countries: Lessons from the Sebokeng Experience

We report the experience gained in an e-Health project in the Gauteng province, in South Africa. A Proof-of-Concept of the project has been already installed in 3 clinics in the Sebokeng township. The project is now going to be applied to 300 clinics in the whole province. This extension of the Proof-of-Concept can however give rise to security aws because of the inclusion of rural areas with unreliable Internet connection. We address this problem and propose a safe solution