This article revisits an analysis by Frondel, Ritter and Schmidt (2008) of Germany’s Renewable Energy Act, which legislates a system of feed-in tariff s to promote the use of renewable energies. As in the original article, we argue that Germany’s support scheme subsidizes renewable energy technologies not based on their long-term market potential, but rather on their relative lack of competitiv...

In communication, information, and other industries, three-part tariffs are becoming increasingly popular. A three-part tariff is defined by an access price, a usage allowance, and a marginal price for any usage in excess of the allowance. The nonlinear-pricing literature has focused primarily on two-part tariffs. We show that consumer behavior differs under three-part tariffs, in particular re...

In the context of the Doha Development Round, the vast majority of computable general equilibrium studies examine agricultural trade led gains to developing countries, whilst European Union based studies are scarce and only one assessment exists in the case of Spain. This study also focuses on Spain, whilst developing the literature in two ways. Firstly, a more realistic representation of the a...

Public finance experts have long explored the issue of income taxes making the cost of market transactions higher than nonmarket ones. A 50 percent income tax, for example, requires $20,000 in income to purchase $10,000 of market goods. The tax can be avoided, however, if the same goods can be produced at home. The upshot is that income taxes encourage the home production of goods and services ...

This paper studies the effects of ad-valorem tariffs on imported cheese quality. Our starting point is a Gorman-Lancaster-style hedonic model of demand for differentiated products. We build on recent identification results for this type of models to nonparametrically estimate product quality using a panel of cheese imports. We use the quality estimates both to recover the equilibrium price func...

In this paper we investigate a bi-level economic model of wireless communications. We take into account the user’s demand and also the QoS offered by the network. We determine with our model when a provider can make more profit by investing into new technology. We consider a Stackelberg game approach where the provider decides the price per rate. In fact, users have to pay for the throughput th...

in this paper the trade restrictiveness of agricultural policies in iran was measured by the triindex for the nine major agricultural products including wheat, rice, barely, maize, soybean,meat (beef meat), soybean oil, sugar and banana over the period 1981 to 2007. the main resultsindicate that there is no trend in above index and high volatility especially in 2006 and 2007years due to conside...

Tariff bindings and administered protection are two characteristics of the WTO that are little understood. Tariff bindings place a ceiling on tariffs that is not always reached, while administered protection ensures that all sectors have access to some minimum import protection, effectively creating a floor for protection. How do these policies affect applied MFN tariff rates that are enacted t...

The welfare aspects of dual exchange rate systems are analyzed in this paper. The requirement that domestic linancial transactions with the rest of the world be undertaken at a special foreign exchange rate is found to be equivalent to levying a tariff on this class of international transactions. Hence, a dual exchange rate system and capital controls are shown to be essentially identical. In l...