De-marketing Tobacco Through Price Changes and Consumer Attempts Quit Smoking

Using panel data from three Canadian provinces, this article examines the relationship between the de-marketing of tobacco products through provincial-level price increases and consumers’ attempts to quit smoking as measured by the uptake of tobacco replacement therapies. We ground our hypotheses in the rational addiction model and the theory of planned behavior. Our analyses suggest a positive, one-month lagged effect of a price increase of tobacco products on the uptake of tobacco replacement therapies. This effect dissipates 3 months later, suggesting that there is a critical period for aggressive de-marketing of tobacco products. We discuss the implications of these results for theory and future research into de-marketing harmful consumer products.     

THE COST OF ILLIQUIDITY AND ITS EFFECTS ON HEDGING

Though liquidity is commonly believed to be a major effect in financial markets, there appears to be no consensus definition of what it is or how it is to be measured. In this paper, we understand liquidity as a nonlinear transaction cost incurred as a function of rate of change of portfolio. Using this definition, we obtain the optimal hedging policy for the hedging of a call option in a Black‐Scholes model. This is a more challenging question than the more common studies of optimal strategy for liquidating an initial position, because our goal requires us to match a random final value. The solution we obtain reduces in the case of quadratic loss to the solution of three partial differential equations of Black‐Scholes type, one of them nonlinear.     

The fiscal impact of high-skilled emigration: Flows of Indians to the U.S.

What are the fiscal consequences of high-skilled emigration for source countries? This paper develops methodologies for inferring these consequences and applies them to the recent sizable emigration of high-skilled workers from India to the U.S. This wave of emigration from India to the U.S. is shown to be unusually concentrated amongst the prime-age work force, the highly educated and high earners. In order to calculate the fiscal losses associated with these emigrants, estimates of their counterfactual earnings distributions are generated using two distinct methods and integrated with a model of the Indian fiscal system to calculate fiscal consequences. Conservative estimates indicate that the annual net fiscal impact to India of high-skilled emigration to the U.S. is one-half of 1% of gross national income (or 2.5% of total fiscal revenues). The sensitivity of these results to the method of predicting counterfactual incomes and the implications of these estimates for other developing countries is discussed in detail.     

Missing in action: teacher and health worker absence in developing countries.

In this paper, we report results from surveys in which enumerators make unannounced visits to primary schools and health clinics in Bangladesh, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Peru and Uganda and recorded whether they found teachers and health workers in the facilities.     

The Housing Price Impact of Covenant Restrictions and Other Subdivision Characteristics

Private land-use restrictions at the subdivision level, commonly called covenant or deed restrictions, have the potential to reduce housing consumption and investment risk and existing empirical evidence has shown a positive marginal housing price for covenant restrictions. However, some commentators have charged that covenant restrictions are full of boilerplate and mostly unenforced, thus any positive marginal price measurement captures other unobserved aspects of the subdivision. Indeed newly published estimates report zero or negative marginal price for deed-restricted subdivisions (DRS). This paper reviews these claims using a hedonic model of housing and a unique dataset that includes covenant restrictions, by-laws, and club goods. Results show a positive marginal price of deed restrictions even when controlling for several subdivision characteristics; however, the marginal price of restrictions falls to zero if a covenant is not updated after 25 years.     

Hedging and Value in the U.S. Airline Industry

This article discusses the findings and practical import of the authors' study of the fuel hedging activity of 28 U.S. airlines during the period 1992‐2003. The aim of the study was to answer the following question: Does fuel hedging add value to the airlines and, if so, how? The airline industry provides a natural experiment for investigating the relation between hedging and value for a number of reasons: (1) the industry is by and large competitive and remarkably homogeneous; (2) airlines are exposed to a single, volatile input commodity—jet fuel—that represents a major economic expense for all competitors; and (3) fuel price increases cannot be easily passed through to customers because of competitive pressures in the industry. The results of the study show that jet fuel hedging is positively related to airline firm value. Those airlines that hedged their fuel costs had Tobin's Q ratios that were 5‐10% higher, on average, than those of airlines that did not hedge. What's more, the higher the proportion of future fuel requirements hedged, the larger the valuation premium. The authors' results also suggest that the main source of value added by hedging in the airline industry is its role in preserving the firm's ability to take advantage of investment opportunities that arise when fuel prices are high and airline operating cash fl ows and values are down. Consistent with this argument, the study finds that the value premium associated with hedging increases with the level of the firm's capital spending. The authors also report that the most active hedgers of fuel costs among the airlines are the larger firms with the least debt and highest credit ratings. This result is somewhat surprising, at least to the extent that smaller airlines are expected to have larger financial distress costs (as a percentage of firm value) and hence greater motive to hedge. One explanation is that the smaller airlines have lacked either sufficient resources or the strategic foresight to acquire a derivatives hedging capability. A second possibility—one that is consistent with the study's main findings—is that the largest airlines also have the highest costs of financial distress (even as a percentage of firm value) in the form of larger growth opportunities that could be lost as a result of high leverage and financial risk. In other words, only the largest airlines are typically able to buy distressed assets during periods of industry weakness; to the extent this is so, such firms may also have the most to gain from hedging.     

Managerial Risk-Taking Incentives and Executive Stock Option Repricing: A Study of US Casino Executives

I examine the relation between managerial incentives from holdings of company stock and options and stock option repricing. Because options provide incentives to increase both risk and stock price, firms must realize that as options go underwater, executives might face incentives to invest in risky, negative NPV projects. Repricing may alleviate such incentives. I examine repricing activity by firms in the US gaming industry and find that risk-taking incentives from options are positively related to the incidence of executive option repricing. The results support the hypothesis that repricing assists firms in alleviating excessive risk-taking incentives of senior management.     

The effect of prime age adult mortality on household composition and consumption in rural Ethiopia

Using panel data from Ethiopia covering 1994–1997, we estimate the impact of prime age adult mortality on household composition, household expenditures and dietary diversity. We employed propensity score matching with a difference-in-difference estimator to control for endogeneity of mortality to the outcomes of interest. Households losing a productive adult did not replenish the lost labor, regardless of economic status, sex or status of the deceased adult. With the exception of non-poor households, adult mortality resulted in increased dependency ratios, but did not adversely affect households’ expenditure patterns (total, food and non-food expenditures) regardless of the sex and position of the deceased and the economic status of the households. Although food expenditures were protected, a decline in dietary diversity, especially among the poorest households, reflected increased nutrition insecurity associated with adult mortality.