This paper examines the effect of the U.S.-Mexico trade agreement under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The results suggest that U.S. agricultural imports from Mexico have been responsive to tariff rate reductions applied to Mexican products. A one percentage point decrease in tariff rates is associated with an increase in U.S. agricultural imports from Mexico by 5.31% in the f...

A strategy to convert quotas to tariffs is to auction the quota rights and use the realized auction prices as guides to setting tariffs. In the 1980s, New Zealand employed auctions to allocate quota licenses. We analyze the relationship between tariff-equivalents and auction prices for auctions with resale. Using panel data from New Zealand’s quota license auctions, we estimate the expected val...

This paper follows up on its companion paper decomposing the effects of the transition from a fully average cost distribution tariff to a cost reflective distribution tariff, in terms of time and location, that uses nodal prices to recover losses and an “extent-of-use” method to recover network fixed costs based on use at coincident peak, but in the presence of distributed generation (DG). As w...

Flat rates are a prominent pricing scheme for telecommunications services and are often preferred by consumers although average costs would be lower in an alternative usage-based tariff. Reasons are that flat rates protect against unexpectedly high costs (insurance effect), are more likely to be chosen if actual usage is overestimated (overestimation effect), and prevent any disutility that is ...

The central question addressed in this paper is whether the presence of the MFA made the NAFTA politically more acceptable. Assuming that the government maximizes a weighted sum of welfare and producer profits, we derive four key results. First, taking the initial level of trade restriction as exogenously given, it is possible for an FTA to be endorsed by both parties under the MFA-like quota i...