Domestic US sugar production has been protected by government policy for the past 82 years, resulting in elevated domestic prices and an estimated annual (2013) $1.4 billion dollar "tax" on consumers. These elevated prices and the simultaneous federal support for domestic corn production have ensured a strong market for high-fructose corn syrup. Americans have dramatically increased their consu...

in an effort to reduce the growing prevalence of overweight and obesity, food taxes have been introduced in several european countries, the so-called ‘obesitax’. as yet little evidence is at hand, policy measures are being taken to counterweight the consumption of unhealthy food or the increasing diet-related diseases. several questions need to be discussed, starting from a general perspective:...

Objective To assess how raising cigarette excise taxes in Peru might impact cigarette consumption, and to determine if higher taxes would be regressive. Methods Total demand price elasticity was estimated by income groups using two datasets: quarterly time-series data from 1993 - 2012 and data from a cross-sectional survey of income and expenses conducted in 2008 - 2009 . A functional form of...

This paper examines the role for tax policies in productivity-shock driven economies with catching-up-with-the-Joneses utility functions. The optimal tax policy is shown to affect the economy countercyclically via procyclical taxes, i.e., “cooling down” the economy with higher taxes when it is “overheating” in booms and “stimulating” the economy with lower taxes in recessions to keep consumptio...

Taxes, Cigarette Consumption, and Smoking Intensity: Reply This paper shows that smoking intensity, i.e. the amount of nicotine extracted per cigarette smoked, responds to changes in excise taxes and tobacco prices. We exploit data covering the period 1988 to 2006 across many US states. Moreover, we provide new evidence on the importance of cotinine measures in explaining long-run smoking behav...

To the editors of health economics review: There is ample evidence on the effects of prices and taxes on heavy drinking, including binge drinking [1]. Experiments on “Happy Hour” discounts in barroom settings have shown that when the price of alcohol decreases, consumption increases, and vice versa [2, 3]. A well-cited meta-analysis of 112 studies (Wagenaar et al., [4]) identified ten studies o...

This paper compares equilibrium paths and the welfare costs between a seignorage tax along both transitional dynamics and steady state. Using a framework that combines monetary policy with public finance, one of these two taxes is used to finance an exogenous stream of public spending in a fashion to balance the government budget. If only equilibrium paths in a steady state are compared, the we...