Tobacco taxes are deemed regressive, because the poorest families tend to allocate larger shares of their budget to purchase tobacco. However, as taxes also discourage tobacco use, some of the most adverse effects, including higher medical expenses, lower life expectancy at birth, added years of...

We investigate the effect of house prices on household borrowing using administrative mortgage data from the United Kingdom and a new empirical approach. The data contain household-level information on house prices and borrowing in a panel of homeowners, who refinance at regular and...

Assuming an inelastic labor supply, existing studies on spatial inequalities across countries show that a larger country has the advantages of a higher wage rate and a higher individual income. This paper reexamines these results by use of a model with an endogenous labor supply and variable...

We analyze the price responsiveness of onshore oil supply from conventional versus new unconventional "tight" formations in the United States. We separately analyze three key stages of oil production: drilling wells, completing wells, and production from completed wells. We find that the...

Fiscal-food policies use taxes to alter relative food prices so as to change diets and are suggested for reducing non-communicable diseases in the Pacific. Price elasticity estimates used by advocates of fiscal-food policies are often biased and may make policy makers too optimistic about small...

In a 2003 report, International Evidence on Food Consumption Patterns, ERS economists estimated income and price elasticities of demand for broad consumption categories and food categories across 114 countries using 1996 International Comparison Program (ICP) data. This report updates that...

In Japan, the newspaper publishers with the greatest daily circulation offer both morning and evening editions in most of their distribution areas, and many of them allow their customers to choose between morning-only and morning-and-evening subscriptions. Each such newspaper publisher, in...