Economists recommend to partly redistribute gains to losers from a structural reform, which in many cases may be required for making the reform politically viable. However, taxation is distortionary. Then, it is unclear that compensatory transfers can support a Pareto-improving reform. This...

Hidden “junk” fees have the potential to distort competition, creating high costs to consumers. However, regulating them can lead to adverse effects, especially in complex markets with intermediaries where they are most prevalent. To explore the equilibrium adjustments of regulating hidden...

A non-trivial fraction of people cannot afford to buy pharmaceutical products at unregulated market prices. Therefore, the paper analyzes the public insurance of the pharmaceutical products in terms of price controls and the socially optimal third-degree price discrimination. It characterizes...

Fuel prices are commonly perceived to be excessively high, which regularly triggers political discussions about fuel price regulations. Consumers demand stricter fuel price regulations to provide transparency about the current price level and to protect them from sudden price fluctuations. Such...

The paper analyses the reasons for Japan's persistently low inflation since the bursting of the Japanese bubble economy (low inflation conundrum). It is shown that Japan experienced a structural break from a high-growth period with relatively high inflation to a low-growth period with...

Understanding how price regulations affect the adoption of new patent-protected pharmaceutical technologies is a crucial question in designing health systems. This paper addresses this question by examining how price expectations shape the probability of launch, controlling for competition,...

The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board administers the purchase and sale of wine and spirits and is mandated to charge a uniform 30% markup on all products. We use an estimated discrete choice model of demand for spirits, together with information on wholesale prices, to assess the implications...

We determine the optimal health policy mix when the average utility of patients increases with the supply of drugs available in a therapeutic class. Health risk coverage rely on two instruments, copayment and reference pricing, that affect the supported risk composed by health expenses and...

We study (energy) markets with dirty incumbents and costly entry by clean producers. For intermediate entry costs, the market outcome exhibits inefficient production and inefficient entry. A policy mix of three popular regulatory instruments-taxation on polluters, feed-in tariffs for clean...