Successful supply-side interdictions into illegal drug markets are predicated on the responsiveness of drug prices to enforcement and the price elasticity of demand for addictive drugs. We present causal estimates that targeted interventions aimed at methamphetamine input markets ('precursor control') can temporarily increase retail street prices, but methamphetamine consumption is weakly respo...

Background and Objectives: Pharmaceutical expenditures are responsible for a major part of health systems’ cost. According to the WHO’s statistics, Iran is the first among the 20 countries in the world in terms of drug consumption. The first step in controlling consumption of a particular good is to identify factor inducing the relevant demands. Hence, this study aimed to identify the pattern a...

In the past 15 years there has been a substantial increase in the taxation of cigarettes in the United States. The federal government and most state governments have increased taxes on cigarettes in an effort to reduce smoking. In the period 1990-2003, the national average price of cigarettes increased by 85%. This paper will use data from 1990-2003 to examine the effect that these large price ...

In this paper, we examine the usefulness of the dominant firm model of price leadership to serve as a benchmark for organizing behavior in laboratory markets. This well established model, whose origins can be traced back over a hundred years, has been recently applied to such landmark antitrust cases as Standard Oil and Alcoa and more recently to the analysis of deregulated markets for electric...

We develop a competition index for differentiated products oligopoly and apply it to assessing the impact of concentration on price in hospital markets in California. Our index, which we term LOCI, is bounded between zero and one and increases with the competitiveness of a market. We use 1992-1995 hospital data from California to estimate the impact of concentration on price using our new conce...

Objective: To estimate cigarette demand and to simulate a tax policy targeted to reduce tobacco consumption. Materials and methods: Demand was estimated using a vector error correction model. Simulation exercises present the impact of a tax increase on consumption and revenues. Results: Changes in real income and the real price of cigarettes affect the demand for cigarettes in Argentina. Th...

In this paper we examine the effect of the income tax on charitable giving. An important challenge in this literature has been to estimate the long-run response of giving to a persistent change in tax-price, which can be difficult to distinguish from intertemporal substitution arising from differences between current and expected future tax prices, arising for example due to transitory fluctuat...