Almost all theoretical work on how to calculate the marginal deadweight loss has been done for linear taxes and for variations in linear budget constraints. This is quite surprising since most income tax systems are nonlinear, generating nonlinear budget constraints. Instead of developing the...

Taxes on housing consumption have attractive features. They can enhance overall efficiency, function as automatic stabilizers, and work progressively. Implementation, however, requires a careful balance between economic ambition and political reality. This article suggests a 5-stage procedure:...

Inflation worries the general public much more than it does the economics profession, and economists remain perplexed as to exactly why. The costs that concern economists are inflation’s deadweight loss. But that is only a part of the losses that concern the public, because inflation...

This study uses the quantity-based Allais-Debreu measure of loss to measure the waste, in output or resources, induced by interventions in the agricultural sector in 18 developing countries.

In this paper we adapt a partial equilibrium approach of Allais and Diewert to measure the efficiency loss in the producing sector due to quotas. The measure of waste is the additional profits available due to reallocation subject to constraints that the welfare of persons and firms outside the...

The objective of this paper is to present Hickssian general equilibrium approaches to productivity measurement in the presence of market failure.

This paper highlights the social costs from non-price rationing of the labour force due to the minimum wage. By short-circuiting the ability of low reservation-wage workers to underbid high-reservation wage workers, the minimum wage interferes with the market's basic function of grouping the...

The resources two rival businesses spend to raise their own chance of getting a unique monopoly license are a cost of rent-seeking. When those businesses differ in the costs of producing the monopoly good there is an additional cost of rent-seeking that has not been studied in the literature. If...

To study the effects of tariffs on GDP one needs import demand elasticities at the tariff line level that are consistent with GDP maximization. These do not exist. We modify Kohli’s (1991) GDP function approach to estimate demand elasticities for 4625 imported goods in 117 countries. Following...

Excess burden is a key concept in the field of public economics, and the authors of most public finance textbooks describe more than one way to measure it. Excess burden can, for example, be viewed as the area of a triangle underneath a demand curve or as the value of a mathematical formula. To...