Many countries now require prominent pictorial health warning labels (HWLs) on the front and back of cigarette packages. In the US, pictorial HWLs have been adopted, but tobacco industry litigation has delayed their implementation. This intervention could have value to smokers, if it increases their information and changes their smoking behavior. In this paper we estimate the value of two different health warning labels for cigarette packages relative to the current US labeling policy. Our methodology does not depend on the personal values of policy makers or other individuals, as the value of information estimates we derive are based solely on smokers’ own consumption choices, not any public health or other effects. We introduce an approach to valuing information with a surplus measure that couples willingness-to-pay from non-hypothetical experimental auctions with time-series revealed preference demand estimates. We find that a pictorial HWL has a large value to smokers, and a higher value than a label that only contains text, insofar as changing purchase behavior.
There are two key arguments against the voter ID requirement. The first is that voter fraud doesn’t exist, which would mean the law has no benefits. This argument is laughable. Just ask Melowese Richardson, who was sentenced to five-years in prison for voting for Obama multiple times in Ohio.
While I find the show entertaining, it troubles me because these types of situations happen in real life. There are people who would be good at a job, but restrictions make it illegal for them to work. The show raises a good question: If somebody wanted to pay a non-lawyer for legal advice/representation, why should that be illegal?
If you insist that the gender wage gap is a result of discrimination against women, here are a few other claims that must be equally true. By the same logic, young men are discriminated against in favor of young women. Women in their 20s without children out-earn men by as much as $1.08 to every dollar, according to some estimates. It must also be true that white men are discriminated against in favor of Asian-American men, who earn over 5 percent more than white men. To claim either of these as discrimination would be ridiculous, though, right? There are differences in job types, education levels, hours worked, and other factors that lead to these wage differentials. But these factors are just as responsible for the overall difference in wages between men and women.
The minimum wage is a bad law. A high minimum wage prompts many firms to hire fewer teenagers – or none at all. Companies will only hire a teenager if they think that teenager will increase their profits, and a higher wage means less profit. Often workers are replaced with machinery, and if you’ve seen touch-screens at grocery stores or restaurants, you’re familiar with how easily machinery can replace young workers if lawmakers enforce high minimum wages. This hurts most the group that it purports to help – low-wage workers, by making many unemployable.
Most troublingly, these low-skilled workers saw “significant declines in economic mobility,” as these workers were 5 percentage points less likely to reach lower middle-class earnings in the medium-term. The authors provide a possible explanation: the minimum wage increases reduced these workers’ “short-run access to opportunities for accumulating experience and developing skills.”
The chair is dedicated to conducting research on the economic and social impact of Tasatur (providing cover for expatriates to illegally run their own business activities) on the Saudi society and ways to combat the phenomenon.
According to Prof. Diyab, “the phenomenon of cover-up businesses has created unhealthy competition in the local market.” He said that the Saudi government has attempted to combat this problem but has been unsuccessful so far with the practice having increased lately. He noted that the government is aware of the negative economic, social, legal and political impact the illegal businesses are having on the society.
In just a matter of months, the price of a barrel of oil has dropped from more than $100 to about $70, and gas is now cheaper than it has been in years. But a recent report conducted for the American Petroleum Institute claimed oil would cost twice as much as it does now if it weren't for America's fracking boom, which wrings oil and natural gas out of shale miles underground.
But the next question could be whether the fracking industry can survive the low prices it brought.
“The shale boom is on a par with the dot-com boom," Russian oil baron Leonid Fedun of OAO Lukoil told Bloomberg. "The strong players will remain, the weak ones will vanish.”
This marks a big shift in global oil politics. Essentially, OPEC is now engaged in a price war with oil producers in the United States. The cartel will let prices keep falling in the hopes that many of the newest drilling projects in the US will prove unprofitable and shut down.
The catch is that no one quite knows how low prices need to go to curb the US shale boom. According to the International Energy Agency, about 4 percent of US shale projects need a price higher than $80 per barrel to stay afloat. But many projects in North Dakota's Bakken formation are profitable so long as prices are above $42 per barrel. We're about to find out how this all shakes out — and which numbers are correct.
In recent years, retailers in Connecticut and across the country have lengthened "Black Friday" bargain shopping by opening on Thanksgiving, usually in the evening.
But some Democrats in the General Assembly fear the consumer holiday is starting to overshadow the traditional one, and hope to pass a law next year that would create disincentives for stores to stay open the last Thursday in November.
"Thanksgiving is the one holiday a year that all Americans share," said state Rep. Matthew Lesser, D-Middletown, who introduced a bill this year that would have required retailers to pay workers triple overtime for Thanksgiving Day hours. "When you're forced to come into work and leave your family on that one day of the year, it really strikes at basic family values."
Low oil prices and financial sanctions from the U.S. and its allies are set to cost Russia between $130 and $140 billion a year, or seven percent of the country’s economy, according to Finance Minister Anton Siluanov.
“We’re losing around $40 billion a year because of geopolitical sanctions, and about $90 billion to $100 billion from oil prices falling by 30 percent,” Siluanov told reporters, according to Reuters. “The main issue that affects the budget and economy and financial system, this is the price of oil and the fall in monetary flows from the sale of energy resources.”
The biggest problem with the $500 million figure is that it falls prey to one of the most serious fallacies in economic impact analysis: the failure to account for the substitution effect. Any money spent by local residents at Cavs games is money not spent elsewhere in the local economy. The extra 150,000 fans who will be going to watch LeBron next year are 150,000 people who at least on game nights aren't going out to nightclubs, restaurants, and theaters. The higher ticket prices mean less disposable income for fans to spend on Indians or Browns games, or movie tickets, or bowling, or free-style skydiving, or whatever it is Clevelanders were doing while LeBron was in South Beach. Similarly, every kid in Cleveland will be getting a LeBron jersey for Christmas or Hanukkah this winter, but this doesn't mean they will be getting more presents; it just means they're getting different presents.
My argument, just like my research has shown most notably in the renewable energy industry, is these types of estimates are typically much higher than careful analysis or reality can confirm,” Swenson said.
Estimates of overall economic impact for the 21-county area in 2013 top $87 billion, up from $61 billion in 2012. For 2023, the 21-county impact is estimated to exceed $137 billion, far higher than the $89 billion forecast for 2022 that we reported in the March 2013 economic impact study. The rationale for the upward revisions (as mentioned above) is due to the way the Eagle Ford continues to exceed expectations in terms of production. In addition, new manufacturing projects associated with the natural gas renaissance in the U.S., as well as new processing, refining and port facilities are factors driving increases in the economic impact statistics.
A joint letter from the presidents of Stanford University and Dartmouth College will be sent to nearly 100,000 Montana voters to apologize for an experiment by three political-science professors at the two institutions. The letter comes after voters and state officials objected to a mailer, sent by the professors, that featured the state’s official seal and offered information about the political leanings of candidates for the state’s Supreme Court as part of an attempt to see whether such information would alter how Montanans voted.The article is interesting and the issues aren't confined to political science. I have a paper that will be published soon examining how economists view and define deception in economic experiments. Once the article is posted online I will link to it here.
The $125,000 number was eye-catching, but it was just the start of the school's approach to teaching. Teachers were also eligible for a bonus of between 7 to 12 percent of their salary. The teachers, who are not unionized, went through a rigorous selection process that included a daylong "audition" based on their teaching skills. The typical teacher already had six years of classroom experience before they were hired.
Many countries now require prominent pictorial health warning labels (HWLs) on the front and back of cigarette packages. In the US, pictorial HWLs have been adopted, but tobacco industry litigation has delayed their implementation. This intervention could have value to smokers, if it increases their information and changes their smoking behavior. In this paper we estimate the value of two different health warning labels for cigarette packages relative to the current US labeling policy. Our methodology does not depend on the personal values of policy makers or other individuals, as the value of information estimates we derive are based solely on smokers’ own consumption choices, not any public health or other effects. We introduce an approach to valuing information with a surplus measure that couples willingness-to-pay from non-hypothetical experimental auctions with time-series revealed preference demand estimates. We find that a pictorial HWL has a large value to smokers, and a higher value than a label that only contains text, insofar as changing purchase behavior.
Several area residents interested in hydrofracking had mixed reactions Wednesday about a recent news report that found that a federal study commissioned by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration was edited or delayed before it was published.
In 2011 the Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission recommended a registry to collect health data from people living nearing fracking operations. Three years later that registry has yet to be created, and a state Senate panel says such a database is an important step toward tracking and responding to public health complaints related to gas drilling.
State Sen. John Yudichak (D-Luzerne) says individual health studies are fine, but the state needs to develop data that covers all parts of the commonwealth.I agree with an organization doing this in theory, but the anti-fracking community could so easily abuse this system for their benefit. If you're an anti-fracking advocate, it would pay to quietly get groups of people to report health complaints that are consistent with the alleged issues fracking could cause.
“There’s been so much myth and misinformation about fracking that has clouded the mainstream media, and the industry has been so late in joining the conversation,” noted producer Chris Faulkner, CEO of Breitling Energy Corporation. “I just couldn’t stand seeing only part of the story – the worst-case scenario part – being told over and over again.”
A month after sending the check, Mr. Smith sent an email to Ms. Burch expressing concern about scenes in the show, then followed up in another email saying he was “not comfortable with ‘Spamalot’ and its homosexual themes.” He said school shows were supposed to be “community events” in South Williamsport, a small town in north-central Pennsylvania that is best known as the host of the annual Little League World Series. Mr. Smith said he didn’t want “families to be afraid of bringing small kids because of the content,” nor students forced “to choose between their own personal beliefs and whether or not to take part in a production.”
But in email to Mr. Smith and in subsequent interviews with the news media, Ms. Burch continued to defend “Spamalot,” a musical comedy based on the movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” that includes a comical subplot about Sir Lancelot as a closeted gay man who ends up coming out and marrying another man. The show ran for four years on Broadway and won the Tony Award for best musical in 2005, and has been performed at high schools for several years.The problem here is that kids (and families) of various beliefs are all forced to attend the same school district. (OK, they're not forced. They could pay taxes into that school district and attend somewhere else by paying twice for education. Perhaps I should we could say families are "forced to pay for the product".) When Spamalot was on Broadway, I don't recall any controversy. Those who didn't want to attend the show didn't attend. Those who wanted to attend did. Nobody who felt offended by the content of Spamalot was forced to pay their money into the show.
The Obama administration is instituting a variety of far-reaching policies to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. Are any of these capable of making a difference? Simple arithmetic suggests not. Given this reality, we would be wise to consider strategies that complement and may be more effective than mitigation—namely, adaptation.
The root cause, of course, is something that neither the President nor the well-intentioned apologists for black academic failure (who cite everything from boredom to Common Core to institutional racism as causal agents), nor union-bashers, nor even school choice advocates care to admit: the lack of respect for, role modeling of, and high expectations for rigorous academic study in many black homes and communities.
Pennsylvania had added 54,000 jobs over the year.
Matthew Rousu, an economics professor at Susquehanna University, notes that politicians generally get too much credit when the economy is good and too much blame when it’s bad.
But Corbett has likely helped the state economy — particularly in rural Pennsylvania — by encouraging natural gas drilling.
There are two key arguments against the voter ID requirement. The first is that voter fraud doesn’t exist, which would mean the law has no benefits. This argument is laughable. Just ask Melowese Richardson, who was sentenced to five-years in prison for voting for Obama multiple times in Ohio.
While I find the show entertaining, it troubles me because these types of situations happen in real life. There are people who would be good at a job, but restrictions make it illegal for them to work. The show raises a good question: If somebody wanted to pay a non-lawyer for legal advice/representation, why should that be illegal?
Barack Obama’s vow to create a “rising, thriving” middle class has instead produced stagnant incomes, a weak consumer economy and a surge in government dependency – all while his overbearing executive branch actively works against the best interests of American laborers. And no agency has been more instrumental in this assault on American productivity than the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) – which was recently at the heart of a major constitutional crisis.
Shooting events are over far faster than most people think. According to a scientifically-validated study on reaction times, the time from a threat event to recognition of the threat (the decision making process) is 31/100 second. The mechanical action of pulling the trigger is as fast as 6/100 of a second.For those who aren't anti-police but are curious about some issues claimed in the Ferguson case, this is great.
There are two types of discrimination recognized by our various civil rights laws: disparate treatment and disparate impact. The former is conscious, intentional discrimination. The latter is unintentional, and is demonstrated through statistical disparities. Here on the Liberty Blog we have often posted on various absurd applications of disparate impact theory. We have also notedhow the Obama Administration is trying to inject disparate impact into nearly every facet of American life. Disparate impact is a pernicious doctrine that forces racial balancing, hurts business, and violates the Equal Protection Clause.
The great 20th-century jurist Learned Hand— who, by the way, has one of the best names in legal history — expressed the principle this way: “Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one’s taxes.”
What they found is that the popular idea that disasters stimulate growth and economic losses are made up quickly isn’t true. Storms cause a long-running reduction in per capita real gross domestic product.
The researchers found if during the course of a year each location in a country experienced maximum cyclone wind speeds of 9.4 meters per second (m/s) above average (about an extra 21 miles per hour), this would result in national income being 3.6% lower in 20 years than it would have been without the storm.
5. In recent developments, mothers took on a governor and politically-connected union.
In early fall 2009, Pam Harris, a resident of suburban Chicago and mother of a young adult son with severe developmental disabilities, received a form letter from agents of Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn informing her that, as a care provider for her son in Illinois’ Disabilities Program, she now could cast a mail-ballot vote regarding which of two unions would be installed as her monopoly-bargaining agent in her dealings with the state.
Republicans generally oppose federal encroachment on policy matters traditionally left to the states. SO why is Rep. Ted Poe (R-Tex) alone among his GOP House colleagues in opposing a federal online gambling ban that would preempt state laws, reward special interests, and curtail an otherwise lawful pastime enjoyed by many Americans?
Just how has Marcellus continued to grow at such a blistering pace? To start, the industry’s learning curve has been impressive. Marcellus natural gas production continues to grow despite a drop in rig count since 2012. Historically, natural gas volumes have responded to shifts in rig counts. Analysts have argued that it would be difficult for the industry to maintain production with a slowdown of drilling activity. (Fracking) has turned this logic flat on its face.
This why Caitlin Dewey, a blogger for the Washington Post who claims that we should praise the challenge for raising so much money, gets it all wrong. The ice bucket challenge has done one good thing, which is raise $3 million for the ALS Association. But it’s also done a really bad thing: take money and attention away from other charities and other causes. That means that, if we want to know whether the ice bucket challenge has been on balance a good thing for the world, we’ve got to assess how effective the ALS Associations is compared with other charities. If 50% of that $3 million would have been donated anyway, and if the ALS association is less than half as effective at turning donations into positive impact on people’s wellbeing than other charities are on average, then the fundraiser would actively be doing harm.
I currently serve as Regents Professor and Willard Sparks Endowed Chair in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Oklahoma State University and also serve as the Samuel Roberts Noble Distinguished Fellow at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. After earning a B.S. in Food Technology from Texas Tech University in 1997, I received a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from Kansas State University in 2000.I’ve been listed as one of the most prolific and cited food and agricultural economists of the past decade in a variety of outlets including here, here, here, and here, won numerous research awards, given lectures at over 30 universities in the US and abroad, published editorials in outlets such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes.com,Foxnews.com, TIME.com, Townhall.com and the Huffington Post, and have made TV appearances on Fox and Friends, the John Stossel Show, and Wall Street Journal Live, among others.
In 2007, I co-authored a book on a consumer research method with Jason Shogren published by Cambridge University Press and co-authored an undergraduate textbook on agricultural marketing and price analysis with Bailey Norwood published by Prentice-Hall. In 2011, I released a book co-authored with Norwood on the economics of farm animal welfare published by Oxford University Press and also co-edited the Oxford Handbook on the Economics of Food Consumption and Policy. My most recent book, The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto about the Politics of Your Plate, was published by Crown Forum in 2013.
I’m the editor of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (Liberty Fund, 2008). It is now on the web at: http://www.econlib.org/library/CEE.html. It has been translated into Russian and Arabic. My book, The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey, was published by Financial Times Prentice Hall in the fall of 2001, and has been translated into Chinese. I also wrote, with my former student, Charles L. Hooper, Making Great Decisions in Business and Life (Chicago Park Press, 2006). It has been translated into Japanese and Korean.
I’ve written about 200 articles for such popular publications as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Barron's, Fortune, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Public Interest, National Review, Red Herring, and Reason. I’ve testified before the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. I’ve also appeared on C-SPAN, CNN, the Jim Lehrer Newshour, the O’Reilly Factor, and the John Stossel show, and I’ve done radio interviews with NPR, the BBC, KQED-FM and many regional radio stations.
