This paper examines the factors affecting prices in the North America banana market. There are substantial price differences between brand name and "generic" companies, and among branded companies. Key questions are what causes these price differences, how are they related to the brand-names of...

Using Qatar as a case study, we exploit a novel micro-data set for 102 raw agricultural imported commodities on a shipment-by-shipment basis over the period January 1, 2005 to June 30, 2010. The data comprise over half a million individual observations, with a very rich set of characteristic...

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...

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...

The Middle East and North Africa region is one of the most politically volatile and food insecure areas on earth. The sum of political upheavals and endemic food-security constraints has reduced many MENA nations to the equivalent of small, import-dependent countries. Such countries are...

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