Food Security and Wheat Prices in Afghanistan: A Distribution-Sensitive Analysis of Household-Level Impacts We investigate the impact of increases in wheat flour prices on household food security using unique nationally-representative data collected in Afghanistan from 2007 to 2008. We use a new estimator, the Unconditional Quantile Regression (UQR) estimator, based on influence functions to ex...

This paper examines how output prices and markups vary across the size distribution of producers. It uses unique plant-level data on physical output, revenue, and input expenditures for six homogeneous U.S. manufactured products. The results reveal that, for five of the six products, output prices decline systematically with increases in plant size. In the most extreme case, corrugated boxes, t...

The regulator of a natural monopoly that sets a two-part tariff and whose marginal cost is stochastic will generally want the price to vary less than marginal cost when the lump-sum charge in the tariff is fixed. A trade-off exists between efficient pricing and an optimal allocation of risk. Pricing at marginal cost is only optimal when the consumer’s marginal utility is independent of the pric...

Many purchases are unplanned and so do not fit comfortably within standard neoclassical consumer theory. We model such ”impulse” purchases by a simple reservation price rule used by impatient consumers. The equilibrium exhibits price dispersion in pure strategies, with lower price firms earning higher profits. The range of price dispersion increases with the number of firms: the highest price i...

We model firm pricing given consumers follow simple reservation price rules. Such reservation rules are rational when consumers are sufficiently impatient. The equilibrium exhibits price dispersion in pure strategies, with lower price firms earning higher profits. The range of price dispersion increases with the number of firms: the highest price is the monopoly one, while the lowest price tend...

A basic tenet of microeconomics is that for a competitive industry in equilibrium the market price of a product will be equal to its marginal cost. This paper develops a model framework and a corresponding empirical inference procedure for estimating longrun marginal cost in industries where production costs decline over time. In the context of the solar photovoltaic (PV) module industry, we re...

The paper assesses the welfare effects of different ways of allocating input price risk between a regulated utility, consumers and speculators in a futures market. A risk-averse utility setting a fixed retail price requires a price that exceeds expected marginal cost, unless an efficient futures market is available. The firm bears no risk when input price risk is transferred to consumers, but c...

Assumptions • There is a continuum of types; specifically, a consumer’s type, θ, is an element of the real interval [θ0, θ1]. • Marginal cost is a constant, c. • Because marginal cost is a constant, there is no loss of generality in considering a single consumer whose type is drawn from the distribution F (·) : [θ0, θ1]. • Assume F (·) is differentiable. Let f(·) be the derivative (the density ...

Time-resolved crystallography and density functional theory calculations are used to analyze the geometric and electronic changes that occur upon photoexcitation of [Cu(I)(dmp)(dppe)](+) in crystalline [Cu(I)(dmp)(dppe)][PF(6)] [dmp = 2,9-dimethyl-1,10-phenanthroline; dppe = 1,2-bis(diphenylphosphino)ethane]. In the pump-probe experiment, laser and X-ray pulses are synchronized to capture an im...