Mass and Elite Foreign Policy Opinions

Since the Vietnam War, public preferences on foreign policyissues have played a greater role in the American politicalprocess. Yet comparatively little is known about the mannerin which attitudes on international affairs are formed and howthey are related to other political cognitions. Using data fromtwo large studies of foreign policy opinion conducted by theChicago Council on Foreign Relations in 1974 and 1978, thisresearch examines the question of how mass and elite opiniondiffers in a number of foreign policy domains and looks at whetherthese distinctions have changed across years. In general, thereare patterns of difference in the foreign policy beliefs ofthe elites and the mass public, the most striking being in their"internationalist" view of the U.S. role in world affairs, withsmaller distinctions in the domains of human rights, detente,world problems, Americanism, and international organizations.     

WHY UNDERSTANDING SMOKING BANS IS IMPORTANT FOR ESTIMATING THEIR EFFECTS: CALIFORNIA'S RESTAURANT SMOKING BANS AND RESTAURANT SALES

A large literature has sought to determine whether smoking bans help or hinder restaurants. Much of the literature improperly specifies its econometric equations and thus mistakenly infers causality. Examining the relationship between restaurant smoking bans and restaurant revenues in 267 California communities, we reach two main conclusions. First, California's municipal restaurant smoking bans are endogenous in a critical way—restaurant sales growth (or something correlated with restaurant sales growth) appears to cause restaurant bans, not vice versa. Consequently, failure to control properly for trends can produce spurious "evidence" of causation. Second, ban heterogeneity (e.g., state versus local) can be exploited to sort out—or rule out—causal effects. In other words, pooling data and treating smoking bans implemented at different levels as homogenous (as many studies do) ignores an important source of information and is likely to lead to erroneous conclusions. Our analysis holds lessons for the many studies that have examined the arguably more important question of how smoking bans affect smoking rates. ( JEL L51)     

Adaptive Multiple Importance Sampling

Abstract. The Adaptive Multiple Importance Sampling algorithm is aimed at an optimal recycling of past simulations in an iterated importance sampling (IS) scheme. The difference with earlier adaptive IS implementations like Population Monte Carlo is that the importance weights of all simulated values, past as well as present, are recomputed at each iteration, following the technique of the deterministic multiple mixture estimator of Owen & Zhou (J. Amer. Statist. Assoc., 95, 2000, 135). Although the convergence properties of the algorithm cannot be investigated, we demonstrate through a challenging banana shape target distribution and a population genetics example that the improvement brought by this technique is substantial.     

一杯冷水泼出个世界首富

在比尔·盖茨成功的背后有着一位伟大人物——盖茨的父亲威廉·盖茨。今年83岁的老盖茨是比尔＆梅琳达·盖茨基金会联席主席，他一直默默地呆在幕后。外界所知甚少，仅仅知道，老盖茨曾是西雅图的律师、参加过第二次世界大战的退伍老兵、非营利组织的志愿者，还有就是三个孩子的父亲。     

An Experimental Approach to Bandwagon Research

This article describes an experiment in which experimental andcontrol questionnaires were sent to two different sample groupsof respondents. Both questionnaires contained the same fouropinion questions and were identical to each other except thateach opinion question on the experimental questionnaire waspreceded by the most recent national poll result on that question.Comparisons of the responses to both questionnaires revealedthat blue-collar workers seemed to react negatively while white-collarworkers seemed to react positively (in both opinion and responserate) to the national poll results