This appendices to this report can be found at: (https://ssrn.com/abstract=3435260). In regulating tobacco products, governments seek to promote public health by discouraging consumption. However, imposing regulatory costs and taxes on licit producers and consumers presents an economic...

This paper endogenizes the interplay between innovation by a regulated firm and regulatory delay. In the signaling model, the firm times its innovation to communicate its private information about the MC of delay to the regulator. When product innovation costs fall over time, an extra day of...

Despite a range of tobacco control policies enacted since the mid-2000s, rates of tobacco smoking in Germany are significantly higher than in many EU nations, and cessation rates remain lower. This report explores the structural reasons for Germany’s historical opposition to tobacco control...

This paper develops and compares specification tests for parametric duration models estimated with censored data. The tests are based on generalized residuals (the integrated hazard), which is exponentially distributed if the model is correctly specified. I present several conditional moment...

This letter evaluates the performance of auxiliary regression-based specification tests for parametric duration models estimated with censored data. The test using asymptotic critical values has poor size. Bootstrapping corrects the size problem but results in a biased power curve

This paper investigates response bias in survey data on annual driving mileage and evaluates the performance of an econometric remedy proposed in the literature, Orbit. There are three contributions in this paper. I first discuss pseudo-precision bias, caused by asking respondents to quantify...

The adoption of e-business at the microeconomic level of retail, wholesale, and labor market transactions has an enormous impact on the performance of firms and the economic welfare of consumers and workers. This article reviews, in broad outlines, the economics of e-business, focusing on...

The newest dimension of the digital divide is access to broadband (high-speed) Internet service. Using comprehensive U.S. data covering all forms of access technology (chiefly DSL and cable modem), I look for evidence of unequal broadband availability in areas with high concentrations of poor,...

Mobile phone usage while driving is increasing throughout the world. In this paper, we use survey data from 7,268 U.S. drivers to estimate the relationship between mobile phone use while driving and accidents. We hypothesize that drivers who use mobile phones while driving may be more likely to...