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)     

VOLATILITY AND IRISH EXPORTS

We analyze the impact of volatility per se on real exports for a small open economy concentrating on Irish trade with the United Kingdom and the United States. An important element is that we take account of the time lag between the trade decision and the actual trade or payments taking place by using a flexible lag approach. Rather than adopting a single measure of risk, we adopt a spectrum of risk measures and detail varied size characteristics and statistical properties. We find that the ambiguous results found to date may be due to not taking account of the timing effect, which varies substantially depending on which volatility measure is used. (JEL C32, C51, F14, F31)     

Managing seasonal fluctuations in demand. Practice and experience of selected industrial enterprises

Principles and methods of production management only seldom address the issue of seasonal variation. Yet, many industrial enterprises are confronted with heavy fluctuations over the year. This article reports on an industrial study of methods developed and applied in six Danish industrial enterprises. The methods represent different approaches to the management of seasonal variation and they often challenge traditions and call for a mental shift on the part of both management and workers.     

CENTRALIZED AND DECENTRALIZED MANAGEMENT OF LOCAL COMMON POOL RESOURCES IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FROM FISHING COMMUNITIES IN COLOMBIA

This article uses experimental data to test for a complementary relationship between formal regulations imposed on a community to conserve a local natural resource and nonbinding verbal agreements to do the same. Our experiments were conducted in the field in three regions of Colombia. Our results suggest that the hypothesis of a complementary relationship between communication and external regulation is supported for some combinations of regions and regulations but cannot be supported in general. We conclude that the determination of whether formal regulations and informal communication are complementary must be made on a community‐by‐community basis. (JEL C93, H41, Q20, Q28)     

Constructing the Public Sphere in Compromised Settings: Environmental Governance in the Alberta Forest Sector

À une époque où l'enthousiasme se manifeste pour une gouvernance environnementale plus délibérative et participative, des études critiques sur ces activités s'avèrent grandement nécessaires. Un forum très en vue sur la gouvernance, le Comité de consultation publique, en est venu à jouer un rôle d'une importance capitale dans la réglementation législative et axée sur les forces du marché des ressources forestières. L'article présente une évaluation critique de ces milieux environnants de plus en plus privés et localisés pour le discours politique du secteur forestier de l'Alberta. Quoique la prudence soit conseillée concernant le potentiel d'engagement actif du citoyen à l'intérieur de comités financés par les entreprises, l'étude de cas révèle l'importance de la variation contextuelle sur la qualité de la délibération.
At a time when enthusiasm waxes for a more deliberative and participatory environmental governance, critical inquiries into these activities are sorely needed. One prominent governance forum is the public advisory committee, which has come to play a central role in the legislative and market-based regulation of forest resources. This paper offers a critical assessment of these increasingly privatized and localized settings for political discourse within the forest sector of Alberta. Although caution is urged regarding the potential for active citizen engagement within corporate-sponsored committees, the case study reveals the importance of contextual variation in the quality of deliberation.     

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