Revisiting an important Canadian natural experiment with new methods: an evaluation of the impact of the 1994 tax decrease on smoking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The panel structure of the Survey on Smoking in Canada (1994-95) and novel methods are used to estimate the impact of an important decrease in the levels of taxation of cigarettes occurring in five out of the ten Canadian provinces that intended to eradicate black market sales of cigarettes in the spring of 1994. Given that black market sales have recently increased substantially because of new taxes, a complete and thorough analysis of the 1994 policy is of particular importance for policy makers. We revisit the issue with new econometric methods to address this evaluation problem as well as focus on particular sub-groups in the Canadian population. The large sample permits precise estimation of the impact of the policy by sub-group showing that females, young males, the poorly educated and separated or divorced individuals were particularly sensitive to these dramatic changes in cigarette prices. We also compute under realistic assumptions a price-elasticity for the probability of smoking and a lower bound on the price-elasticity for the quantities of cigarettes smoked.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.099 | 0.185 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".