Diminishing marginal utility(DMU)is neither necessary nor sufficient for downward sloping demand. Yet upper-division undergraduate and beginning graduate students often presume otherwise. This paper provides two simple counter examples that can be used to help students understand that the Law of...

This paper develops a model of residential water demand under a nonlinear budget constraint. The theoretical model for an individual consumer is adapted to yield an aggregate model that preserves the structure of the individual demand function, and that can be used with aggregate (water district...

Using a maximum entropy technique, we estimate the market shares of each firm in an industry using the available government summary statistics such as the four-firm concentration ratio (C4) and the Herfindahl-Hirschmann Index (HHI). We show that our technique is very effective in estimating the...

If a durable good monopolist produces at constant marginal costs and the good depreciates, there exists a family of Strong Markov Perfect Equilibrium (SMPE) with an infinitesimal period of commitment. One member of this family entails instantaneous production of the level of stock produced in a...

The opening of a new site for the production of aggregates has both direct and indirectimpacts on the environment. The indirect impacts include changes in the environmental costs of hauling aggregates and possible changes in the level of construction activity. In this note, we show that the most...

This paper uses cointegrated time-series methods to evaluate the effect of timber employment on participation in a major poverty program-Aid to Families with Dependent Children-Unemployed Parent (AFDC-UP). The study is conducted for major timber-producing counties in California. It is shown that...

A constant social discount rate cannot reflect both a reasonable opportunity cost of public funds and an ethically defensible concern for generations in the distant future. We use a model of hyperbolic discounting that achieves both goals. We imbed this discounting model in a simple climate...