Objective: To estimate cigarette demand and to simulate a tax policy targeted to reduce tobacco consumption. Materials and methods: Demand was estimated using a vector error correction model. Simulation exercises present the impact of a tax increase on consumption and revenues. Results: Changes in real income and the real price of cigarettes affect the demand for cigarettes in Argentina. Th...

It is often alleged that high auction prices inhibit build-out. We investigate this claim under the extreme case of budget-constrained bidders. Low prices maximize overall the gains from trade. If there are n licenses, the price where the budget constraint just binds maximizes consumer surplus if the elasticity of demand is less than one plus 1/n. If demand is elastic, auctions maximize consume...

This paper examines how estimates of the price elasticity of demand for beer vary with the choice of alcohol price series examined. Our most important finding is that the commonly used ACCRA price data are unlikely to reliably indicate alcohol demand elasticities-estimates obtained from this source vary drastically and unpredictably. As an alternative, researchers often use beer taxes to proxy ...

Distance patients have to travel has shown to influence demand for several health services. Our work looks at this effect on the utilization of Emergency Departments (ED) in Portugal. We build upon previous works by taking into account both the severity of emergency visits and the type of ED and by including a set of other variables that have shown to influence ED utilization. Overall, we find ...

Many industries including music and e-book industries have been making or already made the transition from physical to digital goods in a couple of decades. Since the transformation fundamentally affects the cost structure, consumers’ purchasing behavior, and other critical factors in the industries, it is important to understand the changes that the transition has brought about. This paper emp...

We develop a competition index for differentiated products oligopoly and apply it to assessing the impact of concentration on price in hospital markets in California. Our index, which we term LOCI, is bounded between zero and one and increases with the competitiveness of a market. We use 1992-1995 hospital data from California to estimate the impact of concentration on price using our new conce...

The Elasticity of Labor Demand and the Optimal Minimum Wage Contrary to widespread belief, we show that low-pay workers might not generally prefer that the minimum wage rate be increased to a level where the labor demand is unitary elastic. Rather, there exists a critical value of elasticity of labor demand such that increases in the minimum wage rate make low-pay workers better off for higher ...