Using the credit card application data provided by a major credit card issuer, we estimate the demand for credit card using a regression discontinuity method. Our method exploits a unique feature of the credit card solicitation campaign design, i.e. credit issuer gives consumers different...

Crestor, an important but controversial cholesterol-lowering drug, is contraindicated for use by senior and Asian patients. In this paper, we exploit this fact and a unique doctor-level prescription and advertising (detailing, to be exact) exposure data for statin drugs to examine the hypothesis...

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of California anti-smoking media campaign in changing smoking behavior of adults and adolescents, in the short run as well as in the long run, through individual self-reported exposure to the media message. We construct pseudo panel data using repeated...

In this paper, we investigate the change in advertising patterns of competing pharmaceutical firms in the short period after a new entrant, Crestor, is petitioned to be removed from the Statin drug market. Using physician-level data, we find that Crestor’s main competitor, Lipitor, increases...

An empirical dynamic oligopoly model of the cigarette industry is developed to study the responses of firms to various anti-smoking policies and to estimate the implications for the policy efficacy. Firms are modeled as coordinating in price and competing in advertising in a dynamic game. The...

This paper provides the first empirical study of cigarette demand using detailed individual level data that includes consumers' cigarette brand choice. By estimating and comparing the effects of advertising and price on cigarette demand for different age groups, I find that young adults are less...

The application of cerium-manganese oxides (CeMn) in controlling exhaust gas from biomass combustion is greatly inhibited due to poor resistance to alkali metals. Herein, we report a smart strategy to circumvent the K poisoning problem of CeMn by physically coupling with ZSM-5, which exhibited...

We present a method for estimating Markov dynamic models with unobserved state variables which can be serially correlated over time. We focus on the case where all the model variables have discrete support. Our estimator is simple to compute because it is noniterative, and involves only...