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States and aid agencies use employment programs to rehabilitate high-risk men in the belief that peaceful work opportunities will deter them from crime and violence. Rigorous evidence is rare. We experimentally evaluate a program of agricultural training, capital inputs, and counseling for Liberian ex-fighters who were illegally mining or occupying rubber plantations. 14 months after the program ended, men who accepted the program offer increased their farm employment and profits, and shifted work hours away from illicit activities. Men also reduced interest in mercenary work in a nearby war. Finally, some men did not receive their capital inputs but expected a future cash transfer instead, and they reduced illicit and mercenary activities most of all. The evidence suggests that illicit and mercenary labor supply responds to small changes in returns to peaceful work, especially future and ongoing incentives. But the impacts of training alone, without capital, appear to be low.

The main purpose of this study is to provide empirical evidence on the effects of the cigarette excise tax structure on three outcomes: cigarette prices, government revenues, and cigarette consumption. We composed cross-sectional time-series data for 21 EU countries from year 1998 to 2007 from various data resources. We provide strong evidence that the price gap between premium and low-priced brands is larger in countries with a greater share of ad valorem tax. A 10-percent raise in the share of ad valorem tax in total excise tax leads to about a 4 to 5 percent increase in the price gap, with a smaller impact in more concentrated markets. Our estimates confirm that greater instability of government tax revenues from cigarette excise taxes can be attributed to greater reliance on the ad valorem tax and such instability increases with the growth of manufacturers' market power. We also find that greater reliance on a specific tax has greater impact on cigarette smoking, but the impact diminishes with the growth of manufacturers' market power.

Over the past two decades, two forms of price competition have emerged within the cigarette industry: the introduction and spread of discount and deep discount cigarettes and the increased use of price-related promotions. In this paper, we use quarterly market-level, scanner-based data on cigarette prices, promotions, and sales for 50 US markets over the period from 1994-IV through 2002-II to examine the impact of price and promotions on market shares for premium, discount, and deep discount brand cigarettes. Our estimates indicate that changes in relative prices, including those resulting from promotions, account for much of observed changes in market shares. Copyright Springer 2006brand choice, cigarettes, master settlement agreement, premium, discount and deep discount brands, price and promotion, JEL classification, L1, L66, M30,