Through this paper, we have attempted to model the demand for di¤erent classes of antibiotics used for respiratory infections in outpatient care in Switzerland using a spatial version of the linear approximate Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) model. This model takes spatial dependency into account by means of spatial lags of antibiotic budget shares. We control for the health status of patient...

Discussion Papers are a series of manuscripts in their draft form. They are not intended for circulation or distribution except as indicated by the author. For that reason Discussion Papers may not be reproduced or distributed without the written consent of the author. Abstract This paper analyzes the responsiveness of Thai outbound tourism to East Asian destinations, to changes in effective re...

Recent literature on tobacco taxation suggests that optimal tax rates should be very high. But such high taxes raise concerns over regressivity. Most econometric estimates of elasticities by income group use historic price data that are low, and the usefulness of such estimates is therefore questionable on account of the serious 'out of sample' prediction problem. To address that problem, this ...

In 2011, Switzerland announced a floor for the Swiss franc, and it immediately depreciated by 10 percent. Many argue that depreciations should not matter for Switzerland’s export basket because luxury brands and high value added products predominate, and these should compete on quality rather than price. We measure the sophistication of Swiss exports using Hausmann et al.’s (2007) and Kwan’s (2...

In this paper, we estimate own-price elasticities for fixed network voice telephony access and national calls services for private users as well as cross-price elasticities to mobile services using time series data from 2002-2007 from the Austrian market. Using instrumental variable estimates and considering cointegration, we find that access is inelastic while calls are elastic. We conclude th...

BACKGROUND This paper contributes to the evidence-base on prices and alcohol use by presenting meta-analytic summaries of price and income elasticities for alcohol beverages. The analysis improves on previous meta-analyses by correcting for outliers and publication bias. METHODS Adjusting for outliers is important to avoid assigning too much weight to studies with very small standard errors o...

Elasticities of demand and supply for South African manufactured exports are estimated using a vector error correction model in order to address simultaneity and non-stationarity issues. Demand is highly price-elastic, with elasticities ranging from –3 to –6. The price elasticity of supply is generally about 1, but some estimates are as low as 0.35. Competitors’ prices and world income are impo...

The demand for air transport is largely determined by the spending capacity of customers. This paper aims to offer more insight into the determinants of price elasticities in the aviation sector. It seeks to identify both common and contrasting factors that influence the price elasticities, on the basis of a comparative analysis among a large number of empirical studies in this field. By means ...