Recent economic geography and trade empirical studies based on monopolistic competition [Hanson, 1998; Head and Ries, 1999; Hummels, 1999], suggest high levels of trade price elasticities (between 3 and 11). However, direct estimations of price-elasticities in trade equations, using price indexes at aggregate or industry levels, usually lead to much lower values (around unity). In this paper, w...

The e-book market has been rapidly growing in recent years due to developments in technology and the widespread use of mobile devices such as smart phones and tablet PCs. Although an e-book serves as a nearly perfect substitute for its corresponding paper book in respect of contents, it has many differences regarding cost structure and consumers’ acceptance. Therefore, setting an appropriate pr...

Static optimization of networks by pricing has attracted significant attention over the last decade. These studies assumed concave utility functions for users and derived optimal pricing strategies for the network provider. In this paper, we consider effect of user’s elasticity to price and bandwidth on optimality of pricing. We first derive optimal pricing strategy for the case of logarithmic ...

A model of the Iranian wheat market is specified and fitted to data from 1981-2008. Severaldiagnostic tests were employed in the analysis to determine the specification of the model. Despitethe simplicity of the model and data problems, an examination of the econometric model leads toseveral conclusions with possible important policy implications for the wheat economy in Iran.The general result...

For many products the average price paid by consumers falls during periods of high demand. We use information from a large supermarket chain to decompose the decrease in the average price into a substitution effect, due to an increase in the share of cheaper products, and a price reduction effect. We find that for almost all the products we study the substitution effect explains a large part of...

A carbon tax would penalize carbon intensive fuels like gasoline and shift fuel consumption to less carbon intensive alternatives like biofuels. Since biofuel production competes for land with agriculture, a carbon tax could raise land rents, divert land towards fuel production, and raise agricultural prices. This paper analyzes the welfare effect of a carbon tax on fuel with gasoline and biofu...

This paper considers the effect of child care costs on two labor market outcomes for single mothers—whether to participate in the labor market and whether to receive welfare. Hourly child care expenditures are estimated for all women in the sample (using data drawn from the 1992 and 1993 panels of the SIPP), whether or not they are currently using nonmaternal child care. These expenditures are ...