EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: In a recent article in this journal, Scott (2014) documented the social welfare rationale for offering discounts to the economically disadvantaged. However, he acknowledged the conventional view is that discounts equate to reduced revenue and more tax support which makes them difficult to sustain in many communities. The goal of this paper is to offer an alternative justifica...

Use of disappearance data as proxies for actual consumption causes inconsistent estimates of own-price retail demand elasticities. A system of equations describing consumer, processor, and producer behavior is used to consistently estimate the retail demand elasticity for beef using available data while avoiding the restrictive assumption of fixed input proportions implicit in disappearance dat...

We estimate a generalized linear model to examine adult and teenage cigarette demand. Out analysis focuses on the extent to which excise taxes and regulations restricting smoking in public places affect cigarette consumption. The adult results indicate that the price elasticity of demand is unstable over time, ranging from 0.06 in 1970 to -0.23 in 1985. These estimates are lower than most found...

This study estimates household demand for finfish in the United States using a limited dependent variable model that accounts for both participation and consumption decisions and also accommodates nonnormal and heteroskedastic errors. Results suggest that own-price elasticity is near unitary and income elasticity is small. Price of finfish, shopping frequency, Northeast, Black and other non-Whi...

BACKGROUND Chile is the second world's largest per capita consumer of caloric beverages. Caloric beverages are associated with overweight, obesity and other chronic diseases. The objective of this study is to estimate the price elasticity of demand for soft drinks, other sugar-sweetened beverages and high-energy dense foods in urban areas in Chile in order to evaluate the potential response of ...

Resolving the national debate on the affordability of health care is likely to turn, at least in part, on the question of how consumer demand for health insurance and health care services responds to changes in price or income. Estimates of responsiveness—measured as price and income elasticities—are often used to develop and analyze proposals to expand access to health insurance or constrain t...

We estimate the elasticity of charitable giving with respect to persistent and transitory price and income changes using a 1979–2006 panel of tax returns. Our estimation procedure allows for anticipation of and gradual adjustment to tax changes, controls for various potential sources of omitted variable bias via fi xed effects and income-class specifi c year dummies, and allows for a fl exible ...

This paper explores the effects of trip purpose on price elasticity of bus mode. Data for the research was collected through passenger field survey in Isfahan, Iran. Due to the nature of the data, nonlinear regression and nonparametric statistics tools were used for analysis. It was found that the logarithmic function best explains the relationship between percentage of change in demand and per...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the effects of weight-based pricing in the collection of household waste. Using a comprehensive panel data set on all households in a Dutch municipality we estimate short-run as well as long-run price effects for the amounts of both compostable and non-recyclable household waste. We find significant and sizeable price effects, with the elasticity for...