Registered design memorandum, hash register and ex ante foresight reports for a forecast of the effects of Qatar's Law No 25 of 2018 (tobacco excise) on cigarette imports

Pre-analysis documents for a study that reconstructs the foresight report that could have been written on 30 June 2018, six months before Qatar's Law No 25 of 2018 on excise tax (100 per cent on tobacco products) came into force, and scores it against recorded cigarette imports. The deposit contains: 00_design_memo.md (the design memorandum fixing the models, priors, cut-off dates and decision rules before any model was fitted; git tag design-v1, 12 October 2026); REGISTER.md (the register of SHA-256 hashes of the ex ante reports, predictive draws, code and input data; git tag ex-ante-v1, commit f90b3159); ex_ante_report_2018-06-30.pdf (primary report, cut-off 30 June 2018; SHA-256 f58dde3110154c3a0d4faf1680d8cb68ac695f563170929208cd369ccc720785); ex_ante_report_2017-12-31.pdf (sensitivity report, cut-off 31 December 2017; SHA-256 32c922976f1382d1fe0bdb998b4bc660b07aa9fa1de8019c43ead8f80f8045ba); and 00_deviations.md (the log of every change made after the memorandum was fixed). The record is embargoed until the article that reports the scored forecast has completed peer review; its purpose is to give the registration an external timestamp. The code and derived data will be added to the same concept record on publication. 'Prompt n' in the memorandum and the log denotes the numbered steps of the project's analysis workflow (1 dataset and codebook, 2 ex ante report, 3 ex post evaluation, 4 calibration and scoring, 8 reference check).