The present article generalyses economic litterature on consumption tax incidence to general forms of consumption taxes. Previous studies were limited to the cases of per unit and ad valorem taxes. Three main contributions are provided. From a methodological point of view, the elasticity of the tax function is introduced as a new parameter to take the shape of general consumption tax schedules ...

Import demand elasticities are regularly used to compute trade restrictiveness indices, transform estimated effects of policies into ad-valorem equivalents, or judge on the prohibitive ...

We consider the impact of taxes on the quantity and quality produced of goods, such as wine, for which market value accrues with age. Any pair of taxes that includes a volumetric sales tax and any one of three other types of tax – an ad valorem sales tax, an ad valorem storage tax, or a volumetric storage tax – spans the quality/revenue space and can support an optimal tax system. Provided soci...

This paper analyzes the effects of specific and ad valorem taxation in an industry with downstream and upstream oligopoly. We find that in the short run, i.e. when the number of firms in both markets is exogenous, the results concerning tax incidence tend to be qualitatively similar to models where the upstream market is perfectly competitive. However, both overand undershifting are more pronou...

Theory predicts that unit taxes increase the quality in a market since unit taxes reduce the relative price of high quality goods. Ad valorem taxes, on the other hand, have no effect on relative prices and should not affect product quality. The hypothesis is tested empirically in the US wine market. I find that the market share of high quality wine is significantly increased by unit taxes and t...

This note shows that in the Zodrow-Miesowski-Wilson model, the Nash equilibrium in capital taxes depends on whether these taxes are unit (as assumed in the literature) or ad valorem (as in reality). In a symmetric version of the model with Cobb-Douglas technology, public good provision is higher, and residents in both countries are better off, when countries compete in unit taxes.

In a supply-constrained region like Asia, promoting exports has always been a challenge particularly at a time when Asia’s trade has been severely affected by lack of external demand. This study argues that price barriers have now taken a new shape which may likely to generate differential impacts on trade flows. The size and shape of price barriers would be higher if NTBs, applied by the count...