The health and safety claims regarding electronic nicotine delivery devices should be subject to evidentiary review. The potential benefits of electronic cigarettes to an individual smoker should be weighed against potential harm to the population of increased social acceptability of smoking and use of nicotine, the latter of which has addictive power and untoward effects. As a precaution, electronic nicotine delivery devices should be restricted or banned until more information about their safety is available. If they are allowed, they should be closely regulated as medicines or tobacco products.

This paper examines the impact of diabetes on the employment of Canadian males and females ages 15-64. Using data from the National Population Health Survey (1998), it utilizes a recursive bivariate probit approach to take into account the potential endogeneity of diabetes in employment outcomes. The results suggest that treating diabetes as exogenous yields an over-estimation of its impact on male employment. The study finds that diabetes has a significant negative impact on female employment probability, but has no significant impact on that of non-white Canadians. An implication thus is that policy-makers should take endogeneity into account in estimating labor market costs of chronic diseases such as diabetes.

This article tries to identify the determinants of housing price volatility and to examine the dynamic effects of these determinants on volatility using quarterly data for Canada. The Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedastic (GARCH) and the Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models have been employed to analyse possible time variation of the housing price volatility and the interactions between the volatility and the key macroeconomic variables. We find the evidence of time varying housing price volatility for Canada. Our VAR, Granger causality and variance decomposition (VDC) analyses demonstrate that housing price volatility is affected significantly by gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate, housing price appreciation rate and inflation. On the other hand, volatility affects GDP growth rate, housing price appreciation and volatility itself. The impulse response analysis reveals the asymmetric of the positive and negative shocks. The findings of this article have important implications, particularly for those seeking to develop derivatives for housing market prices.

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Position statement on electronic cigarettes or electronic nicotine delivery systems * Adapted from Adkison et al. 3 ENDS = electronic nicotine delivery systems.