fair trade and the depersonalization of ethics fair trade has changed considerably since its early days in this article we argue that these changes have led to a depersonalization of ethics thus raising serious questions about the future of fair trade in particular the depersonalization of ethics which is seen to accompany the current changes has led to greater variety in the interpretations of fair trade hiding these divergences behind the labels is increasing the risk that the movement will lose its credibility

the effect of physician advice on alcohol consumption count regression with an endogenous treatment effect although there are encouraging trends alcohol abuse continues to be a significant public health problem econometric studies of alcohol demand have yielded a great deal of information for alcohol abuse prevention policy these studies suggest that higher alcohol taxes and stricter drunk driving policies can reduce heavy drinking and drunk driving in this paper we explore the role physician advice plays in the campaign to prevent alcohol related problems compared to alcohol taxation physician advice is a more precisely targeted intervention that does not impose extra costs on responsible drinkers compared to the resource costs of arresting processing and punishing drunk drivers physician advice may be a lower cost intervention to provide a basis for alcohol policy analysis we use an alcohol demand framework to test whether physician provided information about the adverse consequences of alcohol abuse shifts demand to more moderate levels there are three aspects of our alcohol demand model that complicate the estimation 1 the dependent variable is non negative it is a count variable number of drinks consumed 2 a non trivial number of sample observations have zero values for the dependent variable and 3 because the data we use is non experimental the treatment variable indicating receipt of advice from a physician may be endogenous we implement an estimation method that is specifically designed to deal with these three complicating factors our results show that advice has a substantial and significant impact on alcohol consumption by males with hypertension and that failing to account for the endogeneity of advice masks this result copyright 2001 john wiley sons ltd

sprawl or reagglomeration the dynamics of employment deconcentration and industrial transformation in greater paris from 1975 to 1999 employment in the paris metropolitan area became more and more decentralised the losses from central areas were divided equally between sprawl and peripheral clusters parallel to the deconcentration of jobs the growth of a services oriented economy has led to an increase in sectoral concentration however there is no clear evidence of a vertical spatial disintegration because at the same time the economy of all places has tended to diversify one explanation might be that sprawl relies both on endogenous job creation and on job relocation relocations tend to increase the specialisation of the clusters while endogenous growth is more diverse thanks to the importance of domestic activities

the demand for alcoholic drink in the united kingdom 1963 78 1983 the demand for alcoholic drink in the united kingdom 1963 78 applied economics vol 15 no 1 pp 125 140

organic production and ethical trade definition practice and links abstract in recent years there has been a growing debate about ethical aspects of production and trade this has evolved from concerns about fair trade safe working conditions for producers and employees and sustainable and environmentally safe natural resource management the principles of organic agriculture are wide ranging and include concerns for safe food production for the environment for animal welfare and for issues of social justice a working definition of ethical trading and an assessment of the links between organic production and ethical trading were obtained from 34 organisations in the uk involved in ethical or fair trading or organic agriculture interviewees were from major supermarkets independent and multiple retailers alternative trading organisations importers wholesalers accreditation bodies non governmental development agencies and lobby groups a definition of ethical trading based on the interviewees responses is developed and discussed the paper examines current practice in ethical and organic trading and assesses the role of the ethical trading initiative and major supermarkets current and potential links between organic production and ethical trade are explored constraints to linking the two concepts more fully both conceptual and practical are evaluated there is potential for organic production to be ethical using the holistic definition given here by the addition of social criteria to the standards of the organic regulatory authorities ethical trading is now becoming mainstream trading and internationally traded organic produce will therefore have to comply with the current view of what is ethical

changes in the u s wage structure 1963 1987 application of quantile regression the 1980 s witnessed rapid changes in the structure of wages in the united states in this study recently developed techniques for quantile regression are applied to every march current population survey since 1964 and changes in the return to schooling and experience at different points of the wage distribution are examined the quantile regression technique parsimoniously describes the entire conditional wage distribution this conditional distribution is used to examine changes in within group wage inequality as measured by the difference between conditional quantiles two linear models are considered a simple one group model and a 16 group model the results suggest that the returns to schooling and experience differ across quantiles of the wage distribution but their patterns of change are similar significant differences in wage inequality are also found across the various skill groups the paper also presents a new imputation method for cps data

the pricing of revenue assurance reply in their comment yin and turvey yt suggest an approach to overcome a potential problem with stokes nayda and english s sne s methodology for valuing revenue insurance the problem as discussed in sne and yt is that farm gross revenue is not a traded asset therefore revenue insurance which is itself a derivative security i e a security that derives its value from the value of another asset in this case farm gross revenue is difficult to price using standard asset pricing methods because buying and selling the underlying asset to hedge away risk is not possible sne assume an equilibrium pricing function exists and and in doing so are left with one unobservable parameter in their pricing formula yt s comment is essentially to propose a method for eliminating this unknown parameter the problem is that an underlying asset for which a derivative security is written against is not tradable the importance of tackling this issue cannot be over emphasized and yt are to be commended for their efforts indeed virtually no other research besides sne and yt approaches the problem of premium determination for agricultural insurance from the perspective of treating the insurance as a derivative security 1 the importance of doing so is that one gains access to contemporary asset pricing methodology in this reply we focus on two important issues related to the problems created by nontradability first we clarify the tradable versus nontradable distinction in terms of its implications for arbitrage free pricing the results we present provide the necessary background for motivating yt s equation 1 whereas yt begin their comment by assuming an economy that justifies their equation 1 we provide a mathematical characterization of the economy that insures the equation holds taking this approach gives us the opportunity to define the issues yt raise more clearly because the mathj r stokes is assistant professor at the pennsylvania state university university park pa w i nayda is manager of financial analysis and development at capital one inc mclean va 1 counter examples include research by turvey and amanor

the dynamics of fair trade as a mixed form market this article analyses the fair trade sector as a mixed form market i e a market in which different types of players in this case nonprofit co operative and for profit organizations coexist and compete the purposes of this article are 1 to understand the factors that have led fair trade to become a mixed form market and 2 to propose some trails to understand the market dynamics that result from the interactions between the different types of players we start by defining briefly fair trade its different dimensions including the fair quality of the products and its organizational landscape focusing on the distinction between the pioneer alternative trading organizations and the second mover companies then we recall the theoretical emergence factors for each type of organization nonprofit co operative and for profit and apply these emergence factors to the context of fair trade this analysis allows us to capture the specificities of each type of operator with regard to fair trade and thus to have a better understanding of the dynamics in the sector such dynamics includes competition but also conflict and partnership our analysis includes elements on ethical imitation consumers behaviors effects on welfare and the role of the government

reducing binge drinking the effect of a ban on late night off premise alcohol sales on alcohol related hospital stays in germany abstract excessive alcohol consumption among young people is a major public health concern on march 1 2010 the german state of baden wurttemberg banned the sale of alcoholic beverages between 10 pm and 5 am at off premise outlets e g gas stations kiosks supermarkets we use rich monthly administrative data from a 70 random sample of all hospitalizations during the years 2007 2011 in germany in order to evaluate the short term impact of this policy on alcohol related hospitalizations applying difference in differences methods we find that the policy change reduces alcohol related hospitalizations among adolescents and young adults by about 7 there is also evidence of a decrease in the number of hospitalizations due to violent assault as a result of the ban

economic factors affecting the increase in obesity in the united states differential response to price abstract a sharp increase in obesity during the last 15 years in the united states became one of the nation s main public health problems the theory of rational addiction seems to explain human behavior in food consumption leading to obesity reasonably well the interesting thing about our results is that the tax policy normally used to correct various distortions is to serve in this case as the preventive policy additional taxes on future prices of the addictive sweet foods contribute to lower sugar consumption and bmi at present time on the other hand increasing education level is usually considered a preventive type of policy in this case it leads to lowering the levels of the bmi in already overweight and obese population

the price elasticity of opium in taiwan 1914 1942 abstract between 1895 and 1945 the japanese colonial government virtually eliminated opium use in taiwan by licensing and treating existing users prohibiting sales to others and raising the price we evaluate these policies using a two part model to describe the fraction of the population using opium and consumption among users and the rational addiction model by becker et al 1991 we confirm that opium is addictive and find no evidence supporting the rational addiction hypothesis demand is price elastic with estimated short and long run demand elasticities of 0 48 and 1 38 these results have implications for control of other addictive substances

economic conditions and alcohol problems this study investigates the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and two alcohol related outcomes liquor consumption and highway vehicle fatalities fixed effect models are estimated for the 48 contiguous states over the 1975 1988 time period alcohol consumption and traffic deaths vary procyclically with a major portion of the effect of economic downturns attributed to reductions in incomes rather than employment the intake of hard liquor is the most sensitive to the state of the macroeconomy there is no evidence however that fluctuations in economic conditions have a disproportionate impact on the drunk driving of young adults

oil and the macroeconomy since world war ii all but one of the u s recessions since world war ii have been preceded typically with a lag of around three fourths of a year by a dramatic increase in the price of crude petroleum this does not mean that oil shocks caused these recessions evidence is presented however that even over the period 1948 72 this correlation is statistically significant and nonspurious supporting the proposition that oil shocks were a contributing factor in at least some of the u s recessions prior to 1972 by extension energy price increases may account for much of post opec macroeconomic performance

the fair trade movement parameters issues and future research although fair trade has been in existence for more than 40 years discussion in the business and business ethics literature of this unique trading and campaigning movement between southern producers and northern buyers and consumers has been limited this paper seeks to redress this deficit by providing a description of the characteristics of fair trade including definitional issues market size and segmentation and the key organizations it discusses fair trade from southern producer and northern trader and consumer perspectives and highlights the key issues that currently face the fair trade movement it then identifies an initial research agenda to be followed up in subsequent papers

much ado about two reconsidering retransformation and the two part model in health econometrics in health economics applications involving outcomes y and covariates x it is often the case that the central inferential problems of interest involve e y x and its associated partial effects or elasticities many such outcomes have two fundamental statistical properties y 0 and the outcome y 0 is observed with sufficient frequency that the zeros cannot be ignored econometrically this paper 1 describes circumstances where the standard two part model with homoskedastic retransformation will fail to provide consistent inferences about important policy parameters and 2 demonstrates some alternative approaches that are likely to prove helpful in applications

does drinking really decrease in bad times this paper investigates the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and drinking using individual level data from 1987 to 1999 interview years of the behavioral risk factor surveillance system brfss we confirm the procyclical variation in overall drinking identified in previous research using aggregate sales data and show that this largely results from changes in consumption by existing drinkers rather than movements into or out of drinking moreover the decrease occurring during bad economic times is concentrated among heavy consumers with light drinking actually rising we also find no evidence that the decline in overall alcohol use masks a rise for persons becoming unemployed during contractions these results suggest that any stress induced increases in drinking during bad economic times are more than offset by declines resulting from changes in economic factors such as lower incomes

the willingness to pay for the health care under taiwan s national health insurance system in this study we utilized the nested multinomial logit model to estimate the willingness to pay wtp values for different national health insurance nhi coverage plans in taiwan the wtp value for having care from clinics in a hospital care only hco plan is nt 178 us 6 per person month the wtp value for having care from hospitals in a clinic care only cco plan is nt 1342 us 43 per person month the wtp value for the nhi with a universal coverage uc is nt 1540 us 49 per person month the figure nt 1540 us 49 is equivalent to 8 77 of monthly household income much higher than the new premium rate of the new nhi tax 2 5 4 of monthly household income proposed by the taiwan s government our result suggests that taiwan s government may increase the new premium rate further in order to make taiwan s nhi financially more sustainable

ethics faith and profit exploring the motives of the u s fair trade social entrepreneurs although fair trade has grown exponentially in the u s in recent years we do not have a clear understanding of why small u s firms choose to participate in it to answer this question we use a qualitative case study approach and grounded theory analysis to explore the motivations of 35 small fair trade businesses we find that shared values ethical religious or business and the desire to help others altruism often triggered by a critical incident lead social entrepreneurs to found and sustain fair trade businesses the relationship between shared values and engagement in fair trade and the relationship between altruism and engagement in fair trade are strengthened by four motivating factors direct relationships with producers support for social causes the desire for the preservation of craftsmanship and the desire to share aesthetic products these links are strengthened by four facilitating factors which make fair trade engagement easier the acquisition of business knowledge family member involvement in the firm assistance from faith communities and assistance from the fair trade community additional analysis reveals three types of fair trade social entrepreneurs ethics first or ethical entrepreneurs primarily motivated by human rights and social justice concerns faith first or faithful fair traders motivated primarily by their religious faith and business first or benevolent businesspeople motivated by what they perceive to be an opportunity to build a successful business while simultaneously doing good and helping others

congressional influence on u s monetary policy abstract congressional influence is generally discounted or ignored in political models of federal reserve behavior here i show that changes in the leadership of the senate banking committee are significantly correlated with monetary base growth more liberal committee leaders are associated with significantly higher base growth other factors held constant the result is shown to hold across several econometric specifications and different definitions of the congressional preference variable

alcohol and self control a field experiment in india this paper studies alcohol consumption among low income workers in india in a 3 week field experiment the majority of 229 cycle rickshaw drivers were willing to forgo substantial monetary payments in order to set incentives for themselves to remain sober thus exhibiting demand for commitment to sobriety randomly receiving sobriety incentives significantly reduced daytime drinking while leaving overall drinking unchanged i find no evidence of higher daytime sobriety significantly changing labor supply productivity or earnings in contrast increasing sobriety raised savings by 50 percent an effect that does not appear to be solely explained by changes in income net of alcohol expenditures

dealer price discrimination in new car purchases evidence from the consumer expenditure survey this paper documents the variation in dealer discounts for new cars using transactions price data from the consumer expenditure survey consumer specific characteristics fail to explain dealer discounts whereas model market specific and purchase transaction variables e g first time purchase trade in and financing through dealer do explain them the results contradict earlier findings of race and gender discrimination based on a controlled experiment this contradiction is reconciled by examining the higher moments of the empirical discount distribution while mean and median markups do not vary by race and gender minority purchases are characterized by higher dispersion this may rationalize the disparate treatment of minorities by dealers documented in the controlled experiment

the political economy of sin taxes we analyse the determination of taxes on harmful goods when consumers have self control problems we show that under reasonable assumptions the socially optimal corrective tax exceeds the average distortion caused by self control problems further we analyse how individuals with self control problems would vote on taxes on the consumption of harmful goods and show that the equilibrium tax is typically below the socially optimal level when the redistributive effects of sin taxes are taken into account the difference between the social optimum and equilibrium is small at low levels of harm but becomes more pronounced when consumption is more harmful

an exploration of opportunities for the growth of the fair trade market three cases of craft organisations businesses that maintain ethical standards have an advantage in the marketplace based on the increasing interest of consumers in products that have a social and ethical component fair trade organisations that adopt environmental social and ethical principles in trading are in a good position to make the most of this growing interest in the market however it is unclear whether fair trade organisations are taking full advantage of emerging market opportunities for ethically traded products this research explores this issue by describing the business strategies of three fair trade organisations that import and sell craft goods into western countries and evaluates them in the context of this growing market the research findings indicate that in order to remain in business fair trade craft organisations have had to adopt better business practices in recent years improving quality customer service and product offerings to customers however growth appears to be limited as distribution remains focused on a small niche market this paper explores the distribution strategies of two fair trade commodity organisations that are successfully reaching a wider customer base demonstrating that fair trade products have a unique selling advantage in the mainstream marketplace in conclusion fair trade craft organisations are not exploiting this market opportunity to the degree they should and will need to explore wider distribution and alternative business strategies to expand their market share

a two part model of treatment for benign prostatic hyperplasia and the impact of innovation benign prostatic hyperplasia bphs affects more than half of men who are at least 60 years old transurethral resection of the prostate turp is the most common treatment this article estimates the average costs of providing a turp to a patient that chooses the procedure and the expected cost of a turp irrespective of the actual treatment decision it utilizes a modified two part model it first estimates the likelihood of receiving the turp given a bph diagnosis using a logit regression the second step is to estimate the log of turp cost for the population that actually received the procedure for the turp decision data were extracted from the national health interview survey nhis 1986 1994 on 502 men with a diagnosis of bph for the cost model hcia discharge abstract data were used from five states on 26640 men who actually received a turp in 1994 turp was identified via cpt codes in the nhis data the cost of turp was constructed using patient hospital charges and hospital specific cost to c

the identification of urban employment subcenters abstract the purpose of this paper is to propose empirical criteria for the identification of urban employment subcenters it is suggested that gross employment density employment divided by total land area and the employment population ratio are the best measures to identify an urban zone as an employment subcenter these measures are used to identify employment subcenters in the chicago smsa in 1970 and previous studies of housing and land prices in chicago are reviewed

are alcohol tax hikes fully passed through to prices evidence from alaska on 1 october 2002 the state of alaska increased taxes on malt beverages from 0 35 per gallon to 1 07 per gallon increased taxes on wine from 0 85 per gallon to 2 50 per gallon and increased taxes on distilled spirits from 5 60 per gallon to 12 80 per gallon the net effect is that the tax on a standard serving rose from about 3 cents for beer 2 cents for wine and 4 cents for spirits to a uniform tax of 10 cents per standard serving of each type of alcohol beverage this paper uses primary data on alcoholic beverage prices in alaska to study a very basic question what was the impact of the tax hikes on prices an alcohol tax hike is often viewed as a public health policy tool to discourage excessive alcohol consumption and alcohol related problems such as drunk driving the impact of a tax hike on alcoholic beverage prices is a key link in the chain of the causality from the tax to public health economic theory and previous empirical studies mainly of taxes on goods other than alcoholic beverages do not provide very much guidance on what to expect following a tax hike it is an empirical question to answer the question i conducted telephone surveys just before and a year after the tax hike of on premise and off premise alcohol retail establishments across alaska

promotional programmes and consumer purchasing decisions pecan demand models a generalized heckman model of purchase decisions is estimated incorporating perceived consumer quality attributes ease of purchase and familiarity with marketing outlets as factors influencing pecan purchases economic implications for evaluating consumer purchase decisions and the design of commodity promotion programmes for the pecan industry are addressed key marketing variables such as the variety of uses for nut products the number of outlets used to purchase pecans and consumer perceptions of positive quality features of pecans are significant in promoting purchases applications of a trade off analysis examine key variables considered by the pecan industry in developing promotional programmes both to stabilize pecan purchases and to maintain the probability of pecan purchases

spending on alcohol evidence from the family expenditure survey 1970 1983 this paper reports on the investigation of a model of the determination of the share of household expenditure on alcohol using fes data for the united kingdom 1970 83 i e a time series of cross sections the authors pay special attention to the occurrence of zero expenditure variations in characteristics across the population and the modeling and interpretation of the stochastic term this term is modeled using the gamma distribution replacing the normal in tobit estimated parameters indicate strong positive skewness interactions between household characteristics and expenditure propensities are important copyright 1990 by royal economic society

alcohol taxes and labor market outcomes abstract we present reduced form estimates of the effect of alcohol taxes on employment weekly work hours and wages the reduced form estimates are meaningful in two ways first they provide estimates of the effect of an important public policy tool alcohol taxes and second they can be used to evaluate hypotheses about the structural effects of alcohol use on labor market outcomes estimates indicate that there is a weak and indeterminate relationship between alcohol taxes and labor market outcomes this implies that alcohol use does not adversely affect labor market outcomes and is inconsistent with findings from previous studies

the political economy of american monetary policy preface 1 introduction thomas mayer 2 studying the fed towards a broader public choice perspective thomas willett 3 the federal reserve reaction function a specification search salwa khouri 4 corporate profitability as a determinant of restrictive monetary policy estimates for the post war united states gerald epstein and juliet schor 5 federal reserve behavior since 1980 a financial market perspective william melton and v vance roley 6 the federal reserve and its institutional environment a review michael munger and brian roberts 7 the political economy of monetary policy robert hetzel 8 political monetary cycles nathaniel beck 9 congress and the fed why the dog does not bark in the night nathaniel beck 10 the federal reserve as a political power james pierce 11 monetary policy and political economy the federal reserve and the bank of japan thomas cargill and michael hutchinson 12 a positive analysis of the policymaking process at the federal reserve raymond lombra and nicholas karamouzis 13 a theory of fomc dissent voting with evidence from the time series thomas havrilesky and robert schweitzer 14 explaining fomc members votes john gildea 15 fed behaviour and x efficiency theory toward a general framework harinder singh and roger frantz 16 minimizing regret cognitive dissonance as an explanation of fomc behavior thomas mayer 17 the discount window william poole 18 leaning against the wind the behavior of the money stock in recession and recovery 1953 8 elmus wicker 19 bureaucratic self interest as an obstacle to monetary reform edward kane index

are frequency and intensity of participation decision bearing aspects of consumption an analysis of drinking behaviour analysing quantity consumed per period implies a restriction on decisions about how frequently and intensely to consume this quantity hypothesis is rejected based on estimated equations for the frequency and intensity of spirit consumption consequently a simultaneous equation system for frequency and intensity is estimated as they enter the budget constraint as a multiplicative term income and education levels are found to be negatively related to intensity but not frequency this may reflect differences in the shadow prices of frequency and intensity for different socioeconomic groups or heterogeneous preferences for intoxication and health distinguishing between these aspects of drinking patterns is important for the evaluation of the price responsiveness of harmful drinking restrictions on availability and the causes of inequalities in health

employment decentralisation polycentricity or scatteration the case of barcelona at the present time most large cities in the world are polycentric and at the same time they are undergoing processes of employment decentralisation and deconcentration it has been argued that polycentricity is just an intermediate stage between monocentricity and a more unstructured chaotic and amorphous location model scatteration for the case of the polycentric barcelona the aims of this study are to test whether its employment is moving from polycentricity to scatteration and whether its employment location model is increasingly random and unstructured the results show that in spite of the decentralisation and deconcentration processes employment concentrated in centres still represents a significant percentage of total employment and new sub centres have emerged in the periphery what is more the results also show an increasing influence of employment sub centres on employment location and density conditions as a result polycentricity has been reinforced

swings in commercial and residential land prices in the united states abstract we use a large dataset of land sales dating back to the mid 1990s to construct land price indexes for 23 msas in the united states and for the aggregate of those msas the price indexes show a dramatic increase in both commercial and residential land prices over several years prior to their peak in 2006 2007 and a steep descent since then these fluctuations have exceeded those in well known indexes of home prices and commercial real estate prices because those indexes price a bundle of land and structures this comparison implies that land prices have been more volatile than structures prices over this period this result is a key element of the land leverage hypothesis which holds that home prices and commercial property prices will be more volatile all else equal in areas where land represents a larger share of real estate value

congressional oversight committee influence on u s monetary policy revisited abstract grier 1991 shows that monetary policy is influenced by congress in that increases in the liberality of the senate banking committee leadership are significantly positively correlated with monetary base growth chopin cole and ellis 1996 claim that the house leadership statistically dominates the senate leadership for predicting money growth but that the direction of the effect is perverse a more liberal house leadership is associated with a lower rate of base growth in this paper i show that chopin cole and ellis s claims are unfounded properly measured both house and senate leadership have a significant positive effect on base growth over grier s 1991 original sample in later periods money growth regressions are not sufficiently stable to support hypothesis tests

tax design in the alcohol market abstract alcohol consumption generates negative externalities that are non linear in the total amount of alcohol consumed if tastes for products are heterogeneous and correlated with marginal externalities then varying tax rates on different products can lead to welfare gains we study this problem in an optimal tax framework and empirically for the uk market we find that heavy drinkers have systematically different patterns of alcohol demands and welfare gains from optimally varying rates are higher the more concentrated externalities are among heavy drinkers

public monopoly and economic efficiency evidence from the pennsylvania liquor control board s entry decisions we estimate a spatial model of liquor demand to analyze the impact of government controlled retailing on entry patterns in the absence of the pennsylvania liquor control board the state would have roughly 2 5 times the current number of stores higher consumer surplus and lower payments to liquor store employees with just over half the number of stores that would maximize welfare the government system is instead best rationalized as profit maximization with profit sharing government operation mitigates but does not eliminate free entry s bias against rural consumers we find only limited evidence of political influence on entry jel d42 d72 l11 l12 l43 l81

congressional policy preferences and u s monetary policy abstract this paper shows that the evidence of congressional impotence in influencing u s monetary policy presented in chopin et al 1996 is robust to inclusion of a dummy variable for the tenure of house banking committee chairman wright patman this result is in contrast to the assertion of grier 1996 further we show that specification problems of models of congressional influence over a sample period that extends beyond the mid 1980s can be the result of omitted variable bias when macroeconomic variables including oil price shocks are included in the model our results continue to hold contrasting our results with grier s indicates that the evidence concerning congressional influence is sensitive to the measure of congressional preferences

elasticities of beer demand revisited abstract this paper uses u s aggregate beer consumption data from 1964 1992 to empirically estimate the elasticities of demand for beer however rather than assuming the behavioral parameters are time invariant we estimate a gradual switching regression model that explicitly allows the elasticities to change over time results suggest that this more general model is warranted as findings illustrate the importance of variable dynamics when evaluating the efficacy of proposed policy alternatives

mainstreaming fair trade coffee from partnership to traceability summary this article analyzes the recent growth of fair trade and the mainstreaming of this previously alternative arena focusing on coffee i identify a continuum of buyers ranging from mission driven enterprises that uphold alternative ideas and practices based on social ecological and place based commitments to quality driven firms that selectively foster fair trade conventions to ensure reliable supplies of excellent coffee to market driven corporations that largely pursue commercial industrial conventions rooted in price competition and product regulation using a commodity network approach my analysis illuminates the impacts of diverse buyer relations on producer groups and how relations are in some cases shifting from partnership to traceability

taxing to control social costs the case of alcohol whether taxation of alcoholic beverages is an appropriate means of reducing social costs of alcohol consumption is a continuing public policy issue some argue that the public health costs and other external costs associated with the consumption of alcoholic beverages are so significant as to justify substantial excise taxes on those beverages others counter that a tax on alcohol would reduce consumption indiscriminately and therefore reduce the satisfaction experienced by millions of sensible drinkers without necessarily reducing the harm caused by a few excessive drinkers 2 this paper presents and applies a framework for evaluating these two views of the efficiency welfare effects of alcohol taxes determining the efficiency implications of alcohol taxes is complicated by the question of whether and how much abusers especially alcoholics benefit from alcohol consumption standard welfare theory assumes that all consumers of alcohol enjoy positive net benefits consumer surplus however it is possible that alcoholics over consume in the sense that consumer surplus from their

regional obesity determinants in the united states a model of myopic addictive behavior in food consumption obesity is considered one of the largest public health problems in the united states today the premise for our study is a body of results from medical research showing that sweetened foods i e an increased consumption of sugars leads first to sugar addiction and second to carbohydrate addiction and increased consumption of fats the latter feature is actually responsible for the increase in body mass index bmi but the trigger that produces cravings for extra calories is sugar and sweeteners based on our results a myopic model of addictive behavior in food consumption seems to capture the food consuming habits and related outbreak of obesity among the american population our results indicate that lower current and past real prices of sugar contribute significantly to higher values of bmi and increase the likelihood of becoming obese in the united states

the effects of taxes on purchases of sugar sweetened carbonated soft drinks a quantile regression approach the consumption of large quantities of sugar sweetened carbonated soft drinks sscsd may lead to obesity which is associated with health problems such as diabetes cardiac diseases and mental health problems the effects of increasing the value added tax vat on purchases of sscsd are estimated obesity is more likely among heavy drinkers than among light or moderate drinkers therefore the effects on high and low purchasing households are estimated by using quantile regressions qrs on norwegian household purchase data since many households did not purchase sscsd during each survey period censored as well as ordinary qrs are used our results suggest that a vat increase from 13 to 25 will have the highest percentage effect among low purchasing households but the absolute effect is highest among high purchasing households low purchasing households will reduce their purchases by about 5 l while the reduction is almost 20 l among high purchasing households however the effects among high purchasi

a comparison of alternative models for the demand for medical care we have tested alternative models of the demand for medical care using experimental data the estimated response of demand to insurance plan is sensitive to the model used we therefore use a split sample analysis and find that a model that more closely approximates distributional assumptions and uses a nonparametric retransformation factor performs better in terms of mean squared forecast error simpler models are inferior either because they are not robust to outliers e g anova anocova or because they are inconsistent when strong distributional assumptions are violated e g a two parameter box cox transformation

an ordered generalised extreme value model with application to alcohol consumption in australia an ordered generalised extreme value ogev model by small 1987 is proposed for application to ordered discrete choice data relative to conventional ordered probit logit op ol and multinomial logit mnl models the ogev model is flexible is defined by random utility maximization and allows for correlation across choices via unobservable individual characteristics according to locations of the choices in the ordering the ogev model is applied to unit record data from australia to study the impacts of prices income and demographic characteristics on levels of alcohol consumption model selection analysis suggests that ogev is preferred to both op and mnl for the application

using quantile smoothing splines to identify employment subcenters in a multicentric urban area abstract the goal of this paper is to provide a statistically based definition of employment subcenters for multicentric urban areas in particular we examine the shape of the employment density function using quantile smoothing splines as a nonparametric empirical specification this approach allows inspection of the employment gradient at the upper tail rather than the center of the employment density distribution as a result our definition of employment subcenters extends previous work as it allows us to condition on distance from the central business district relies on the extent to which a subcenter influences surrounding areas yet still emphasizes areas with high employment densities

optimal departures from marginal cost pricing focuses on departures from marginal cost pricing optimal allocation or resources level of tax revenue that will be collected by the government theorems developed for resource allocation ebsco

the demand for alcohol the differential response to price although several studies indicate that drinking is responsive to price little work has focused on whether prices have a differential effect on light moderate or heavy drinking this study examines the price responsiveness of the demand for alcohol whether heavy drinkers are less sensitive to price than light or moderate drinkers the study uses data on alcohol consumption on the 1983 national health interview survey the results indicate that both light and heavy drinkers are much less price elastic than moderate drinkers further we cannot reject the hypothesis that the very heaviest drinkers have perfectly price inelastic demands