air pollution is an example of a negative externality; it imposes harmful effects and costs on people other than polluters. in controlling air pollution, efficiency argument implies that, there is a rolefor the government to play. studies show that taxation of fuels can be a powerful indirect instrumentfor controlling air polluticn because of the association between fuels use and emissions. in ...

To what extent has Sub-Saharan Africa’s slow economic growth over the past five decades been due to price and trade policies that have discouraged production of agricultural relative to non-agricultural tradables? This paper uses a new set of estimates of policy distortions to relative prices to address this question econometrically. We first test if these policy distortions respond to economic...

We construct a time-variant, price-based measure of trade distortions in 28 manufacturing industries for a large sample of countries over the last four decades, documenting facts consistent with the argument that changes in relative prices are an important channel through which an economy’s openness affects outcomes. First, we find that price distortions at the aggregate level are negatively as...

Sticky-price models often suggest that relative price distortion is a major cost of in‡ation. We provide an intuition for this: Even at low rates, in‡ation strongly a¤ects price dispersion which in turn has an impact on the economy qualitatively similar to, and of the order of magnitude of, a negative shift in productivity. The utility cost of price dispersion is quanti…ed and its impact on opt...

Advances in trading technology have made it possible for traders to very quickly buy and resell financial assets. How does this increase in trading frequency affect prices? In a traditional rational expectations framework, since prices reflect underlying fundamentals, trading frequency typically does not play a significant role. We show that this result is very sensitive to small errors in the ...

We study the effect of frequent trading opportunities and categorization on pricing of a risky asset. Frequent opportunities to trade can lead to large distortions in prices if some agents forecast future prices using a simplified model of the world that fails to distinguish between some states. In the limit as the period length vanishes, these distortions take a particular form: the price must...

In the presence of price distortions, cost-benefit analysis must include changes in the deadweight loss in addition to the direct benefits and costs to transportation users and nonusers. Advances in new economic geography (NEG) have highlighted the importance of price distortions associated with imperfect competition. This paper reviews recent contributions to cost-benefit analysis in NEG model...