The Harmonized System (HS), developed beginning in 1970, attempted to establish categories for "like" goods at different levels aggregation and similarity in the market. This is not dissimilar to the concept of relevant product market competition policy. But the HS, even with up to !0 category...

This paper presents an in-class experiment used as a teaching tool in an introductory microeconomics class at the undergraduate college level. It is directed at a critical but challenging concept for principles students — constrained utility maximization and a methodology to intuit...

This paper extends the literature on consumer decision-making and energy efficiency through recourse to insights from behavioral economics and neuroeconomics. This approach is motivated by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) new regulations mandating more stringent energy-efficiency standards...

This article investigates changes in capital stock composition that are caused by Abstract changing statutory tax rates in a pure Haig-Simons net income tax. Such a tax system allows the deduction of economic depreciation. An increase in the statutory tax rate results in an increase in the...

When Contracting Parties finally signed the Uruguay Round GATT Agreements, then EC Members were split on reform of the EC banana import regime. An ambiguous legal outcome allowed EC States to sign the GATT accords while reserving the right to challenge the EC banana regime, defended adamantly by...

This note provides a general concept of how the conflict of interest between credit rating agencies and financial entities that hire them to rate issues can be severed. The concept stresses addressing the conflict with minimal government regulation. Only a skeleton concept is offered -- the goal...

Recent periods of volatile food prices have prompted several import-dependent Arab micro-states to consider at least some domestic production as a way of mitigating extremely volatile food prices, which even in rich micro-states can have adverse health and economic effects. Using Qatar as a case...

Multilateral trade rounds have stressed converting non tariff barriers to simple tariffs. The WTO Agreement on Agriculture includes the "price-gap" method that was prominent in the Uruguay Round. Many agricultural products, once considered commodities, are in fact differentiated products with...

Consumers are often blamed for not making necessary investments in energy-efficient durables despite that these investments have positive net present value (NPV). Several papers have argued that when investments have option-like characteristics (e.g., irreversibility, uncertainty, flexible...