In March 2009, Business and Economic Research Limited ("BERL") published “Costs of Harmful Alcohol and Other Drug Use,” a report jointly commissioned by the Ministry of Health and ACC. BERL was asked to measure the costs of drug and alcohol abuse to New Zealand society, but not to evaluate...

We review methods and assess the policy influence of a series of publiclyfunded Cost of Illness studies, mostly published since 1990. Our analysis shows that headline cost estimates, including the influential paper by Collins and Lapsley (2008), depend on an incorrect procedure for incorporating...

Matt Burgess presented Dynamic Electricity Pricing in California: Do Customers Respond? at an ISCR seminar May 2006.

Investigations into the causes and effects of parallel importing have concentrated on price discrimination but arbitrage can also occur on non-price dimensions. Using a natural experiment in the New Zealand film distribution industry between May 1998 and November 2001 we examine the effect of...

Recent years have seen the development of new theories of market failure based on asymmetric information and network effects. According to the new paradigm, we can expect substantial failure in the markets for labor, credit, insurance, software, new technologies and even used cars, to give but a...

Brennan and Hamlin (2002) note that expressive voting still holds at the constitutional phase. The argument, when taken to its necessary conclusion, proves quite problematic for Constitutional Political Economy. Veil mechanisms following Buchanan induce expressive voting at the constitutional...

While several cross-sectional studies (La Porta et. al. 2002, Norton 2002) examine institutional and cultural determinants of economic freedom, changes in economic freedom remain unexamined. I construct a measure of median voter preferences and find changes in voter preferences for economic...

E-commerce may prove a double-edged sword for antitrust enforcement. While the internet massively increases the potential size of the relevant market for any antitrust investigation, thereby reducing the need for antitrust activity, it also opens firms up to protectionist uses of antitrust by...

The distributive politics literature following Weingast (1979) predicts majoritarian redistribution within countries governed by strong party systems. This prediction is tested using evidence from Canadian job creation grant programs active during the mid-1990s. Results provide strong evidence...