Seminal work by Weitzman (1974) revealed prices are preferred to quantities when marginal benefits are relatively flat compared to marginal costs. We extend this comparison to indexed policies, where quantities are proportional to an index, such as output. We find that policy preferences hinge...

Political pressure in the United States is again building to constrain pharmaceutical prices either directly or through legalized reimportation of lower-priced pharmaceuticals from foreign countries. This study uses the Clinton Administration's Health Security Act (HSA) of 1993 as a natural...

Efficient electricity pricing involves two-part tariffs: a volumetric price equal to the marginal cost of producing an additional kilowatt hour (kWh) and a fixed fee to cover any remaining fixed costs. In this paper we explore how US electricity regulators depart from this simple two-part tariff...

We study the impact of targeted price controls for supermarket products in Argentina from 2007 to 2015. Using web-scraping, we collected daily prices for controlled and non-controlled goods and measured the differential effects on inflation, product availability, and price dispersion. We first...

This paper assesses the importance of price regulation and price discrimination to low-income students' access to opportunities in public higher education. Following a policy change in the state of Texas that shifted tuition-setting authority away from the state legislature to the governing...

When food prices spike in countries with large numbers of poor people, hunger and malnutrition are very likely to result in the absence of public intervention. For governments, this is also a case of political survival. Government actions often take the form of direct interventions in the market...

A hedonic model featuring quality-quantity tradeoffs reveals a number of surprising market behaviors that can result from price regulations that are imposed on competitive markets for products that have adjustable non-price attributes. Quality need not clear a competitive market in the same way...

We estimate expenditures by US natural gas distribution firms to reduce natural gas leaks. Reducing leaks averts commodity losses (valued at around $5/Mcf), but also climate damages ($27/Mcf) because the primary component of natural gas is methane, a potent greenhouse gas. In addition to this...

This paper posits the conceptually useful allegory of a futuristic "World Climate Assembly" that votes on global carbon emissions via the basic principle of majority rule. Two variants are considered. One is to vote on a universal price (or tax) that is internationally harmonized, but the...

Drugs like bevacizumab ($50,000 per treatment episode) and ipilimumab ($120,000 per episode) have fueled the perception that the launch prices of anticancer drugs are increasing over time. Using an original dataset of 58 anticancer drugs approved between 1995 and 2013, we find that launch...