We revisit the cost of the U.S. sugar program by analyzing the welfare implications of its removal. We use a multimarket model of U.S. sweetener markets, which includes raw crops, sugar extraction and refining, high-fructose corn syrup, and sweetener users (food-processing industries and final consumers). Our approach addresses the industrial organization of food industries using sweeteners and...

Article history: Received 3 March 2009 Received in revised form 14 July 2009 Accepted 3 September 2009 Available online 14 October 2009 Tariffs and anti-dumping duties are two important tools used to protect industries from foreign competition and to generate revenue. While the two tools have been studied extensively in separate contexts, little is known about their comparative effects. This pa...

This paper investigates the cross-occupation effect of offshorability on wage rates by examining the occupation switching behavior of workers previously employed in highly offshorable occupations. Instead of looking at the labor market for occupations that are traditionally vulnerable to import competition, we study the destination occupations for the workers displaced from import-competing sec...

Phage display peptide libraries are widely used in various protein-protein interaction studies to determine the immunological binding of proteins and epitope mapping of different targets. In the present study, the peptide library is used to identify the Fab binding epitope site of Tetanus Toxoid (TT). The peptides were screened against Fab by biopanning, using a random peptide 12mer phage displ...

Asthma, a common disorder that affects >250 million people worldwide, is defined by exaggerated bronchoconstriction to inflammatory mediators including acetylcholine (ACh), bradykinin and histamine-also termed airway hyper-responsiveness. Nearly 10% of people with asthma have severe, treatment-resistant disease, which is frequently associated with immunoglobulin-E sensitization to ubiquitous fu...

This paper discusses the political economy behind the principal trade policy decisions in Russia since independence. I discuss why export restraints were widely employed in the early transition years and why the export quotas proved more difficult to remove than anticipated. Why it was so difficult to resolve the monetary basis for the collapse in trade among the newly independent states. Why t...

We study the effects of reforms in the legal scope of patent rights (PRs) on the international pattern of sectoral exports, before and after implementation of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement at the World Trade Organization (WTO), in a generalized factor-proportions framework. We find that, conditional on factor endowments and intensities, a country wi...

Building on the experience of NAFTA, and assuming that rules of origin (RoO) negotiated under NAFTA are likely to resemble those that would be agreed upon in an FTAA, this paper discusses how different RoO criteria would affect different Southern partners in a multi-stage production setting. Next, we use a combination of parametric and non-parametric methods to estimate the costs of RoO under N...

Economists often use event study methodology to evaluate the impact of new regulations on firms before there is enough data to empirically estimate the effects. This research investigates the degree to which event study methodology can provide useful information in this regard by studying how accurately markets predict the actual benefits associated with a new law. Specifically, I utilize a uni...

Government budget balance forces the endogenous use of distortionary tax instruments when an exogenous reform is implemented. The aggregate efficiency of such reforms is based on comparisons of simple summary measures of the Marginal Cost of Funds of the various tariff or quota changes with the Marginal Cost of Funds of the alternative taxes, or of the Marginal Benefit of Government supplied go...