Animal welfare is increasingly being scrutinised in Australia and one issue receiving particular attention is mulesing, the removal of wrinkled folds of skin around a sheep’s breech area to prevent blowfly and maggot infestation. This procedure is commonly performed without any form of pain relief. In the past, it has been justified on the basis of being a preventative health measure against br...

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The forthcoming creation of a single European currency area will likely have far reaching impacts on the competitive position of European industries, as a result of a decline in transaction costs and currency risks for intra-European trade. These impacts will take place independent of the question whether the 15 EU countries form an Optimum Currency Area or not. The generally expected gains of ...

The impacts on public transit ridership of changes in gasoline prices and service levels have been studied, while the combined effects of gasoline price changes under different levels of transit service have not. This paper discusses a consumer welfare calculation based on a binary mode choice model for commuters in idealized corridors with varying public transportation levels of service. Welfa...

Theoretical investigations have examined both anti-competitive and efficiency-inducing rationales for vertical bundling, making empirical evidence important to understanding its welfare implications. We use an extensive dataset on full-line forcing contracts between movie distributors and video retailers to empirically measure the impact of vertical bundling on welfare. We identify and measure ...

The welfare implications of intellectual property protection (IPP) for private sector agricultural research are analyzed, focusing on the realistic cases in which countries provide different IPP levels, technology spills over across countries, and the public sector is involved in research. A model is developed to determine who benefits from, and who should pay for, the associated research. The ...

China enacted a rural tax reform known as the “Tax-for-Fee Reform” (TFR) in the late 1990s, in large part driven by an attempt to address farmers’ complaints about their perception of a heavy tax burden. A crucial but unanswered question is whether this reform actually improved farmers’ welfare. This paper applies several estimation methods, including both cross-sectional propensity score match...