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...

Within the framework of spatial tax competition with cross-border shopping, we examine the choice of tax method between ad valorem tax and unit (specific) tax. The paper shows that governments endogenously choose ad valorem tax not because of a classic welfare reason, but because it is a good strategy in competing for mobile customers. Another key finding is that while governments are committed...

Economic theory states that on market with imperfect competition, per unit consumption taxes should induce a larger increase of prices than ad valorem consumption taxes. It implies that consumers bear a larger share of the tax burden for per unit consumption taxes than for ad valorem consumption taxes. The present paper aims at testing empirically this theoretical result. It uses the French mar...

Debit cards have become an indispensable part of the U.S. payments system, accounting for more than a third of consumer payments at point of sale. With this development has come controversy: Card networks charge merchants fees that merchants believe are too high. And most of the fees are ad valorem—that is, based on transaction value—rather than fixed fees per transaction. Merchants are critica...

This paper investigates a puzzle and possible policy concern: Why do platforms such as eBay and Visa that enable the trade of goods of different unobserved costs and valuations rely predominantly on linear ad-valorem fees, that is, fees that increase in proportion to the sale price of the trades that they enable? Under a broad class of demand functions, we show that a linear ad-valorem fee sche...

This paper compares the e¢ ciency implications of aggregate output equivalent unit versus advalorem tax regimes when monopolistically competitive …rms produce di¤erentiated products with either homogenous or heterogenous costs. The model allows for …rms to price at a variable markup over marginal cost. In line with most prior …ndings the superiority of ad-valorem tax continues to hold when …rms...

BACKGROUND The distribution of cigarette prices has rarely been studied and compared under different tax structures. Descriptive evidence on price distributions by countries can shed light on opportunities for tax avoidance and brand switching under different tobacco tax structures, which could impact the effectiveness of increased taxation in reducing smoking. OBJECTIVE This paper aims to de...

Applying a framework of perfect competition under uncertainty, we contribute to the discussion of whether or not ad valorem taxes and specific taxes are equivalent. While this equivalence holds without price uncertainty, we show that ad valorem taxes and specific taxes are “almost never” equivalent in the presence of uncertainty if we demand equivalence to hold pathwise. Since we obtain this re...

This paper investigates the effect of economic integration on the ability of firms to maintain a collusive understanding about staying out of each other’s markets. The paper distinguishes among different types of trade costs: ad valorem, unit, fixed. It is shown that for a sufficient reduction of ad valorem trade costs, a cartel supported by collusion on either quantities or prices will be weak...