In response to parasite resistance to older malaria medicines, the global health community is planning to make new, more effective malaria treatments called Artemisinin Combination Therapies (ACTs) available over-the-counter at heavily subsidized rates throughout Africa. While this may go a long way toward reducing under-treatment (thereby saving lives in the short-run), it is also likely to in...

Between 2006 and 2011, daily print newspapers in the U.S. lost 20% of their paid subscribers, partly due to increasing availability of alternative sources of news, such as free content provided on newspaper websites and by news aggregators such as Yahoo. However, contrary to the expectation that firms respond to softening demand by lowering prices, newspapers increased subscription prices by 40...

This paper constructs a simple model to illustrate that the current food stamp subsidy scheme fails to achieve its aim due to the crowding-out effect. In particular, if the household income is sufficiently low, only the corner solution exists and full subsidy is needed. The optimal food stamp subsidy scheme is identified and the subsidy efficiency rate is introduced to measure the impact on foo...

It is expected that fuel subsidy removal should hinder carbon emissions growth through low energy consumption channels amid higher prices. However, outliers in this theoretical disposition make empirical proof of the subsidy-carbon intensity apt and primitive. Despite established abolishment gains for climate economic welfare, relevance, magnitude policy implications remain dimly. This paper em...

To motivate more people to participate in vaccination campaigns, various subsidy policies are often supplied by government and the health sectors. However, these external incentives may also alter the vaccination decisions of the broader public, and hence the choice of incentive needs to be carefully considered. Since human behavior and the networking-constrained interactions among individuals ...

An individual should be indifferent between a rebate subsidy of rate sr and a matching subsidy of rate sm = sr/(1 sr), and the total amount received by the charity should be the same regardless of subsidy type. Recent laboratory and field experiments contradict these straightforward predictions of standard economic theory: subjects consistently make decisions that result in larger amounts going...

Energy poverty can be understood as the inability of a household to secure a socially and materially necessitated level of energy services in the home. While the condition is widespread across Europe, its spatial and social distribution is highly uneven. In this paper, the existence of a geographical energy poverty divide in the European Union (EU) provides a starting point for conceptualizing ...

It is a pleasure to be invited to discuss this rich paper by Jeffrey Frankel and Andrew Rose. After the events of the past few years, with a range of commodity prices exhibiting great volatility, it is not hard to motivate Frankel and Rose’s choice of topic, seen from either a longor medium-term perspective. The authors use annual data, mainly in a panel context, to examine the relationship bet...