Scientific evidence on the effect of sugar consumption on obesity has propelled policy makers in several states across the U.S. to propose the imposition of a tax on soft drinks sales. In this paper, we look at the effect of two tax events: a 5.5% sales tax on soft drinks imposed by the state of...

Inflation rates have traditionally been measured by the annualized percentage change in the price level of a market basket of consumer goods and services purchased by households. The market basket represents the spending patterns of average household. However, households differ in their spending...

We empirically assess the distributional impacts and welfare effects of policies to incentivize renewable electricity production for the case of Italy. We use data from the Household Budget Survey between 2000 and 2010 to estimate a demand system in which energy goods' shares of expenditure are...

Tourist taxes represent one of the principal sources of revenue for a number of local authorities. Using a dataset of more than 300 thousands reviews on TripAdvisor, we analyze the effect of tourist taxes on online ratings posted by hotel costumers. Online ratings are strategic variables for the...

The Value Added Tax (VAT) was introduced in India in place of Sales Tax, taking effect in April 1, 2005. These taxes are in the domain of different state governments within the country's federal set up. Although VAT is widely acclaimed to be a better system than the sales tax on grounds of...

Empirical welfare analyses often impose stringent parametric assumptions on individuals' preferences and neglect unobserved preference heterogeneity. In this paper, we develop a framework to conduct individual and social welfare analysis for discrete choice that does not suffer from these...

Governments all over the world have invested tens of billions of dollars in car scrappage programs to fuel the economy in 2009. We investigate the German case using a unique micro transaction dataset covering the years 2007 to 2010. Our focus is on the incidence of the subsidy, i.e., we ask how...

Following the adoption by the international community of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) approach, which provides the basis for concessional lending by the multilateral institutions, there has been a resurgence of interest in the poverty and social impact analysis (PSIA) of different...

We present a novel methodology to quantify the social costs and benefits (net social costs) of electric vehicles as an endogenous, demand-driven abatement technology in a general equilibrium framework. This new costing approach relates general equilibrium effects resulting from an increased...

International institutions are recommending policies aimed at shift- ing the tax burden from labour and business incomes to less growth- detrimental forms of taxation, such as consumption taxes. However, de- spite the expected positive macroeconomic effects, a criticism about in- creasing the...