the purpose of this paper is to estimate the welfare cost of inflation in iran. we first use the long-horizon regression approach developed by fisher and seater (1993) to obtain an estimate of the inflation rate elasticity of money demand and then the baily’s consumer surplus approach to calculate the welfare cost function. the results show that reducing inflation rate from 40% to 0% increases ...

Some European regulators have decided to force competition in their national markets. They have decided to go beyond the second directive and apply asymmetric regulation. Gas release programs and market shares constraints are the two asymmetric decisions imposed to incumbents. When a regulator imposes a gas release program to an incumbent, this operator is compelled to release quantities of its...

Marshallian consumer surplus (MCS) is generally an inaccurate measure of welfare change because it neglects income effects. Suppose these effects overturn the usual demand response to a price change. Then, the deadweight loss from a distortionary tax or subsidy has the wrong sign, that is, there is a spurious deadweight gain. JEL Classification: D11, D6.

Conventionally, we think of an increase in competition as weakly decreasing prices, increasing the number of consumers served, thus increasing consumer surplus, decreasing firms profits, etc. Here, we demonstrate that, under some tame circumstances, an increase in competition may lead to a price increase in a horizontally differentiated market. We show this relationship for the petrol market in...

A stricter merger control policy increases the expectation of future price competition. In response, firms increase product differentiation to sustain higher prices. Failing to account for such policy-variant prices may lead to overestimation of the increase in consumer surplus due to the stricter merger policy, rendering the policy analysis subject to the Lucas Critique. D 2004 Elsevier B.V. A...

The paper synthesizes and develops the welfare analysis of regulating relative prices, for example price differences, of which banning price discrimination is a special case. Welfare results are derived directly by convexity arguments using functions of welfare levels. The method is also used to obtain results about effects on consumer surplus.

We examine sensitivity of estimates of recreation demand using the Travel Cost Method (TCM) to four factors. Three of the four have been routinely and widely discussed in the TCM literature: a) Poisson verses negative binomial regression; b) application of Englin correction to account for endogenous stratification; c) truncation of the data set to eliminate outliers. A fourth issue we address h...

In a simple representative consumer model, vaccines and drug treatments yield the same revenue for a pharmaceutical manufacturer, implying that the firm would have the same incentive to develop either ceteris paribus. In a more realistic model with heterogeneous consumers who vary with respect to the probability of contracting the disease, the revenue equivalence between vaccines and treatments...

I systems and the Internet have facilitated the creation of used-product markets that feature a dramatically wider selection, lower search costs, and lower prices than their brick-and-mortar counterparts do. The increased viability of these used-product markets has caused concern among content creators and distributors, notably the Association of American Publishers and Author’s Guild, who beli...

This paper presents a model for the credit card industry, where oligopolistic card networks price their products in a complex marketplace with competing payment instruments, rational consumers/merchants, and competitive card issuers/acquirers. The analysis suggests that card networks demand higher interchange fees to maximize card issuers’ profits as card payments become more efficient. At equi...