30,828 research outputs found
Fiscal Discrimination Between Consumer Groups: Tax Burden Distribution Under Price Discrimination
No full textIn this paper it is analysed, how, under price discrimination, the tax burden is shared between the distinct consumer groups. Unit and ad valorem taxes are compared, revealing an impossibility of fiscal discrimination with regard to price changes. Contrary to conventional tax incidence analysis, it is shown that quantities traded do matter. Relative market shares are decisive for the distribution of tax burdens thereby opening up an opportunity for fiscal discrimination in choosing tax types. This discriminatory potential is limited and not caused by price discrimination per se but rather due to monopolistic supply.Tax incidence, unit tax, ad valorem tax, price discrimination
The balance between specific and ad valorem taxation
No full textA recurring issue in indirect tax design — most obviously, but not only, for goods traditionally subject to heavy excises — is the appropriate balance between specific and ad valorem taxation. Recent work has developed new perspectives on the issue, which is also one of the oldest in the formal study of public finance. This paper provides a broadly non-technical account of the central considerations that arise in choosing the balance between specific and ad valorem taxation, reviewing and somewhat extending the lessons of theory and experience. There emerge clear presumptions as to the relative effects of the two kinds of tax on such attributes as price, profits, product quality and variety. But the socially optimal balance between them is likely to be quite sensitive to the characteristics of the market at issue.
Price-setting behaviour in Belgium : what can be learned from an ad hoc survey ?
No full textThe article reports the results of an ad hoc survey on price-setting behaviour conducted in February 2004 among 2,000 Belgian firms. The reported results clearly deviate from a situation of perfect competition and show that firms have some market power. Pricing-to-market is applied by a majority of industrial firms. Prices are rather sticky. The average duration between two consecutive price reviews is 10 months, whereas it amounts to 13 months between two consecutive price changes. This evidence is consistent with the fact that both the price-reviewing process and the act of changing a price entail specific costs. Most firms adopt time-dependent price-reviewing under normal circumstances. However, when specific events occur, the majority will adopt a state-dependent behaviour. Evidence is found in favour of both nominal (mainly implicit and explicit contracts) and real rigidities (including fl at marginal costs and counter-cyclical movements in desired mark-ups), in line with the recent macro-literature where the interplay between both types of rigidity is emphasised. The survey results point to a non-negligible degree of non-optimal price-setting, suggesting that informational frictions could also be a source of sluggishness in the inflation process.price-setting behaviour, price rigidity, real rigidity, survey, time-dependent pricing, pricing-to-market
Price Setting in Lithuania: More Evidence from the Survey of Firms
No full textThe paper examines price setting in Lithuania based on ad hoc survey of the Bank of Lithuania “On Price and Wage Setting”. The study extends the survey data analysis presented in Virbickas (2009). The paper points to the incidence of both the time-dependent and the state-dependent price reviewing policies used by the investigated firms, though the price reviewing practices appear to be somewhat tilted to the state-dependent pricing. Analysis provides evidence on the reasons for upward and downward stickiness of prices. Delayed price adjustment is found to be mostly related to the price adjustment stage rather than the price reviewing stage. The most momentous explanations for not adjusting prices upwards or downwards rest on the cost-based pricing and the explicit contracts. The study finds an asymmetric influence of some of the price factors. In particular, the cost factors are found to be decisive in invoking the price increase rather than the price decrease.price review, price adjustment, price stickiness
Price Setting in France: new Evidence from Survey Data
No full textThis paper reports the results of a survey conducted by the Banque de France during winter 2003-2004 to investigate the price-setting behavior of French manufacturing companies. Prices are found to adjust infrequently; the median firm modifies its price only once a year. Price reviews are more frequent than price changes; the median firm reviews its price quarterly. Firms are found to follow either time-dependent, state-dependent or both pricing rules. Moreover, the chosen interval of price reviews depends on the probability that changes in the firms' environment occur. Coordination failure and nominal contracts (either written or implicit) are the most important sources of price stickiness, while pricing thresholds and physical menu costs appear to be totally unimportant. Asymmetries in price stickiness are found to be different for cost shocks compared to demand shocks: prices are more rigid downward than upward for cost shocks, while the reverse is true for demand shocks.Price rigidity ; Price-setting behaviour ; Inflation persistence ; Survey data
What Firms' Surveys Tell Us about Price-Setting Behavior in the Euro Area
No full textThis study investigates the pricing behavior of firms in the euro area on the basis of surveys conducted by nine Eurosystem national central banks, covering more than 11,000 firms. The results, consistent across countries, show that firms operate in monopolistically competitive markets, where prices are mostly set following markup rules and where price discrimination is common. Around one-third of firms follow mainly timedependent pricing rules, while two-thirds allow for elements of state dependence. The majority of the firms take into account both past and expected economic developments in their pricing decisions. Price reviews happen with a low frequency, of about one to three times per year in most countries, but prices are actually changed even less. Hence, price stickiness arises at both stages of the price-setting process and is mainly driven by customer relationships — explicit and implicit contracts — and coordination failure. Firms adjust prices asymmetrically in response to shocks: while cost shocks have a greater impact when prices have to be raised than when they have to be reduced, a fall in demand is more likely to induce a price change than an increase in demand
Price Indexes for Microcomputers: An Exploratory Study
No full textIn this paper we focus on alternative procedures for calculating and interpreting quality-adjusted price indexes for microcomputers, based on a variety of estimated hedonic price equations. Our data set comprises an unbalanced panel for 1265 model observations from 1982 to 1988, and includes both list and discount prices. We develop and implement empirically a specification test for selecting preferable hedonic price equations, and consider in detail the alternative interpretations of dummy variable coefficients having time and age, vintage and age, and all of the time, age, and vintage dummy variables as regressors. We then calculate a variety of quality-adjusted price indexes; for the Divisja indexes we employ estimated hedonic price equations to predict prices of unobserved models (pre-entry and post-exit). Although our indexes show a modest amount of variation, we find that on average over the 1982-88 time period in the US, quality-adjusted real prices for microcomputers decline at about 28% per year.
Link stability estimation based on link connectivity changes in mobile ad-hoc networks
No full textDear Wang,
Re: Link Stability Estimation Based on Link Connectivity Changes in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks
I have not been able to assess if this is an author version peer-reviewed or is it an author version non peer reviewed. Could you please clarify this so I can proceed to add your paper to Spiral. Spiral digital repository only accept peer-reviewed papers.
30/11/12 author has confirmed peer reviewe
Unit versus ad valorem taxes : the private ownership of monopoly in general equilibrium
No full textIn an earlier paper [Blackorby and Murty; 2007] we showed that if a monopoly sector is imbedded in a general equilibrium framework and profits are taxed at one hundred percent, then unit (specific) taxation and ad valorem taxation are welfare-wise equivalent. In this paper, we consider private ownership of the monopoly sector. Given technical difficulties in making a direct general equilibrium comparison of unit and ad valorem taxation, we
adopt a technique due to Guesnerie [1980] and Quinzii [1992] in a somewhat different context of increasing returns and non-convex economies to show that neither ad valorem taxation nor unit taxation Pareto dominates the other; although, generally, the two are not welfare-wise equivalent
Corrective Ad Valorem and Unit Taxes: A Welfare Comparison
No full textThe ad valorem versus unit taxes debate has traditionally emphasized tax yield. For this criterion, ad valorem taxes outperform unit taxes in terms of welfare for a wide range of imperfect competition settings, including Dixit-Stiglitz monopolistic competition. Yet, in a number of policy fields, such as environmental, health or trade economics, policy makers apply taxes to target the production/consumption volume in an industry, i.e. aim at a certain corrective effect rather than tax yield. This paper compares the two tax instruments with respect to equal corrective-effect in a Dixit-Stiglitz setting with love of variety, entry, exit, and redistribution of tax revenues. We find that unit taxes lead to more firms in the industry, less output per firm, less tax revenue, but higher welfare compared to ad valorem taxes.Externalities; Monopolistic competition; Taxes; Specific taxes; Welfare
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