This paper offers a possible explanation for the existence of continual government budget deficits such as experienced in a number of industrialized countries in recent years. Based on the assumption that higher tax rates cause more intensive tax-aversion behavior (tax avoidance and tax...

When Arthur Laffer or other "supply side advocates" plot total tax revenue as a function of a particular tax rate, he draws an upward sloping segment called the normal range, followed by a downward sloping segment called the prohibitive range. Since a given revenue can be obtained with either of...

Limiting tax expenditures can raise revenue without increasing marginal tax rates. Such a policy is equivalent to reducing government spending now done as subsidies through the tax code for a wide range of household spending and income. This paper explores one way of limiting tax expenditures: a...

Gasoline taxes can be employed to correct externalities from automobile use and to raise government revenue. Our understanding of the optimal gasoline tax and the efficacy of existing taxes is largely based on empirical analysis of consumer responses to gasoline price changes. In this paper, we...

A growing body of empirical literature finds that consumers are relatively limited in how much they search over product characteristics. We assemble a dataset of search and purchase behavior from eBay to quantify the returns, and thus implied costs, to consumer search on the internet. The...

This paper examines the impact of e-commerce on pricing behavior and welfare. Using Japanese data, we find that the entry of e-commerce firms significantly raised the rate of intercity price convergence for goods sold intensively online, but not for other goods. E-commerce also lowered relative...

We examine the effect of consumer reviews on relative sales of books on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. We find that 1) reviews are overwhelmingly positive at both sites, but there are more reviews and longer reviews at Amazon.com, 2) an improvement in a book's reviews leads to an increase in...

Trust is vital for market development, but how can trust be enhanced in a marketplace? A common view is that more trusting may help to build trust, especially in less developed economies. In this paper, we argue that more trusting may lead to less trust. We set up a rational expectation model in...

The internet has dramatically reduced the cost of varying prices, displays and information provided to consumers, facilitating both active and passive experimentation. We document the prevalence of targeted pricing and auction design variation on eBay, and identify hundreds of thousands of...

Increased competition from the internet has raised concerns about the quality of prescription drugs sold online. Given the pressure from the Department of Justice, Google agreed to ban pharmacies not certified by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) from sponsored search...