deriving a flexible mixed demand system the normalized quadratic model this article deals with the specification of a locally flexible and theory consistent system of mixed demand functions a framework that allows for a rich set of possibilities about what is assumed as exogenous in a demand model a coherent mixed demand system is derived by using the restricted expenditure function typically studied in the related area of rationed demands the method is implemented by a new normalized quadratic nq parameterization of the restricted expenditure function the resulting nq mixed demand system is illustrated with an application to a nine good model of the italian demand for vegetables

the structure of licensing contracts industrial organization theory has explored several issues related to licensing but empirical analyses are extremely rare we amass a new and detailed dataset on licensing contracts and use it to present some simple facts concerning licensing behavior our analysis reveals robust cross industries differences in several contractual features such as exclusivity cross licensing ex ante versus ex post technology transfers and licensing to related versus unrelated parties we offer an interpretation of these facts based on cross industry variation in the strength of intellectual property rights

unit roots and granger causality in the ems interest rates the german dominance hypothesis revisited abstract the aim of this paper is twofold first it shows that a sufficient conditions for unit roots found in ar systems to persist in var systems amount to granger non causality in any direction among the variables involved this implies that a necessary condition for the disappearance of one unit root in a var system implies granger causality in at least one direction b for first order models with non explosive variables granger causality is also sufficient for cointegration and c causality and cointegration inference are strongly affected by the omission of an important causing variable second our new analytical framework allows us to formulate and test several new variations of the so called german dominance hypothesis in a unified cointegrating framework which we define as strong semi strong and weak types 1 and 2 german dominance in addition we allow for the possibility that the dominant player may lie outside the ems so that we introduce and test the us dominance hypothesis

ethanol production food and forests this paper investigates the direct and indirect impacts of ethanol production on land use deforestation and food production a partial equilibrium model of a national economy with two sectors and two regions one of which includes a forest is developed it analyses how an exogenous increase in the ethanol price affects input allocation land and labor between sectors energy crop and food the total effect of ethanol prices on food production and deforestation is decomposed into three partial effects first the well documented effect of direct land competition between rival uses arises it increases deforestation and decreases food production second an indirect displacement of food production across regions possibly provoked by the reaction of international food prices increases deforestation and reduces the food sector s output finally labor mobility between sectors and regions tends to decrease food production but also deforestation the total impact of ethanol production on food production is negative while there is an ambiguous impact on deforestation

risk sharing in licensing abstract this paper studies the design of linear license contracts under demand or cost uncertainty the optimal contract consists in general of a mix of a fixed fee and royalties the source of uncertainty has a crucial impact on the type of royalties that must be used in particular under demand uncertainty at most two of the instruments are used the contract generally combines a fixed fee with an ad valorem royalty when cost is uncertain a wider variety of cases can arise the contract may involve a combination of either type of royalties coupled with a fixed fee alternatively it may be optimal to use all three available instruments

evaluating prior beliefs in a demand system the case of meat demand in canada an almost ideal demand system for meats is estimated using canadian data a bayesian approach is used to impose inequality restrictions on substitution elasticities via monte carlo integration and importance sampling in order to conform with prior beliefs about curvature and monotonicity restrictions and substitution relationships results are more consistent with the concavity and monotonicity restrictions from demand theory than with the added restriction that all meats are substitutes

the implications of mean variance optimization for four questions in international macroeconomics abstract the hypothesis of mean variance optimization has powerful implications transcending particular methods used for variance covariance estimation 1 for conventional estimates of risk aversion substitutability between domestic and foreign securities is close to perfect in the sense that risk premiums are small in magnitude a few basic points and thus cannot explain much bias in forward rates 2 nevertheless as long as risk aversion is not zero foreign exchange intervention still affects the level of the exchange rate proportionately at least to asset supply changes 3 current account deficits also have effects 4 finally dollar depreciation should not be accompanied by appreciation of the mark against the franc

capital controls and balance of payments crises abstract the theory of balance of payments crises shows that under perfect foresight a system of fixed exchange rate is not sustainable in the presence of diverging economic policies in this paper it is shown how and why capital controls succeed in maintaining the principle of a fixed but adjustable parity both cases of a devaluation and a revaluation are considered and a condition for a parity change to be credible is presented

maintaining and testing separability in demand systems we derive a general elasticity representation of the necessary and sufficient conditions for direct weak separability of the utility function parametric restrictions required to implement the separability conditions are presented for three common demand systems the almost ideal translog and rotterdam our empirical application uses the rotterdam model to test a few separable structures within a complete u s demand system emphasizing food commodities results based on size corrected likelihood ratio tests provide support for commonly used separability assumptions about food and meat demand

estimating the environmental impact of land and production decisions with multivariate selection rules and panel data we propose an estimation procedure dealing with multivariate selection and dynamics in land choice and unobserved heterogeneity in structural and crop selection equations the method is applied to a multi output profit function with multiple corner solutions and farm level panel data estimation results reveal that the single selection rule associated with the tobit procedure is rejected in favor of our multivariate selection treatment inconsistent estimates are expected with the tobit procedure or if farmer fixed effects are omitted which can have important consequences for policy recommendations as illustrated in an evaluation of nitrogen runoff elasticities with respect to economic variables copyright 2011 oxford university press

a cointegrated vecm demand system for meat in italy this article applies cointegration techniques to estimate a monthly demand system for meat in italy in contrast to existing studies where engle and granger s two step procedure and triangular vector error correction model tvecm representations are usually exploited it applies a cointegrated vector error correction model vecm where also prices and expenditure enter endogenously the system and the cointegration rank is not assumed to be known a priori but subject to inference it highlights some of the advantages of using the vecm compared to the tvecm including the possibility of testing the cointegration rank of the system and the weak and strong exogeneity of prices and expenditure within a well specified statistical model this may lead to remarkable improvements in the efficiency of parameters system estimates

advertising habit formation and u s tobacco product demand the u s tobacco market has experienced a shift toward noncigarette tobacco products we examined the degree of habit formation and the role of advertising for cigarettes little cigars cigarillos large cigars e cigarettes and smokeless tobacco using market level scanner data for convenience stores from 2009 to 2013 results based on a dynamic demand system show that while all tobacco products are habitual e cigarettes are the most habitual product more choices of flavors less restrictions on its use in public places less documented harmful effects and a higher upfront cost might explain the higher degree of habit formation for e cigarettes we also find that e cigarettes did not substitute for or complement c igarettes the results imply that e cigarettes may serve as a gateway to nicotine addiction but not necessarily to cigarette smoking regarding advertising cigarette magazine advertising did not affect cigarette demand while e cigarette tv advertising increased e cigarette demand with a positive spillover to cigarette demand such results may help explain e cigarettes recent success in sales and imply that e cigarette tv advertising might undermine efforts to reduce cigarette smoking advertising was al so found to affect the degree of habit formation for cigarettes large cigars and e cigarettes

modeling the reforms of the common agricultural policy for arable crops under uncertainty the size of the insurance and wealth effects of a change in the common agricultural policy cap for arable crops is estimated the impact of price uncertainty is accounted for in the specific decision making structure of the european union eu arable crop producers under nonlinear mean variance risk preferences a system of output supply input demand and land allocation equations is estimated on a sample of italian specialized arable crop farms the simulation of the impact of the recent reforms confirms that farmers output responses are consistently affected by the size of the insurance and wealth effects

a flexible multistage demand system based on indirect separability the notion of indirect separability is exploited to derive a new multistage demand system the model allows a consistent parameterization of demand relations at various budgeting stages and it fulfills the requirement of flexibility while satisfying separability globally two propositions are derived to characterize flexible and separable functional forms which lead to the specification of a flexible and separable translog fast demand system the model is particularly attractive for modeling large complete demand systems and is illustrated with an application

evaluating the impact of reforming the food subsidy program in egypt a mixed demand approach abstract food subsidy is one of the policies considered to protect consumer welfare against food price increases in particular when the insufficient local production has to be complemented by food imports with volatile prices egypt has experienced several food crises the latest in 2008 which put an halt to attempts to reform in depth the system of food subsidies because of social unrest in this paper we use a mixed demand approach to analyze the consumption structure of egyptian households our model specification takes into consideration the characteristics of the egyptian food subsidy system where some food items have predetermined quotas while others are associated with predetermined subsidized prices price income and quota elasticities are estimated from the egyptian family expenditure survey and welfare change measures are derived by income class simulations of various options to eliminate subsidies on selected food items are conducted we estimate the negative welfare impact of the reforms especially in the context of increasing food prices by comparing welfare effects of policy options by income quartiles and by household category rural urban

technology transfer under asymmetric information licensing contracts for newly patented innovations are observed to vary along several dimensions including the form and size of the payment to the inventor fixedfee versus some output based royalty the degree of exclusivity and the division of rents in this article we show that theform of the contract can be explained by two problems in technology exchange the superiority of a licensor s precontractual information about the economic value of the innovation and thefact that sharing this information with the licensee mayfacilitate imitation we show that a licensor signals her technology type with an output based payment or royalty and may leave some of the rents with the licensee conditions under which exclusive license contracts linear and nonlinear and nonexclusive linear contracts are used to transfer technology are identified

technology and efficiency in a panel of italian dairy farms an sgm restricted cost function approach this article employs a short term specification of the symmetric generalised mcfadden sgm cost function capable of accommodating quasi fixed factors and variable returns temporary equilibrium and scale economies are investigated while maintaining the consistency of the estimated model with microeconomic theory and approximation properties it also makes use of a two step procedure to estimate first the technology parameters and then time varying efficiency at farm level no distributional assumptions are required on efficiency as we consider a fixed effect model a balanced panel of italian dairy farms during the years from 1980 to 1992 serves as the case study the results suggest a rigid productive structure during the pre and post quota period moreover italian milk producers are found to exhibit considerable excess capacity and rather low input technical efficiency

fee versus royalty licensing in a cournot duopoly model abstract this paper finds that royalty licensing can be superior to fixed fee licensing for the patent holding firm when the cost reducing innovation is non drastic the reason for this result is that the patent holding firm enjoys a cost advantage over the licensee under royalty licensing while the two firms compete on equal footing under fixed fee licensing

contracting with externalities the paper studies inefficiencies arising in contracting between one principal and n agents when the utility of each agent depends on all agents trades with the principal when the principal commits to a set of publicly observable bilateral contract offers the arising inefficiency is due entirely to the externalities imposed on non signers in contrast when the principal s offers are privately observed the distortion is due to the externalities given agents equilibrium trades comparison of the two externalities determines the relative efficiency of the two contracting regimes in both cases we show that when n is large each agent can be treated as non pivotal provided that appropriate continuity assumptions are satisfied we also study the case in which the principal can condition each agent s trade on other agents messages we characterize the set of such mechanisms in which each agent s participation is voluntary when the principal can commit to any such mechanism she implements the first best outcome while threatening each deviator with the harshest possible punishment however in the presence of noise that goes to zero slower than n goes to infinity in the limit we obtain a generally inefficient outcome in which each agent feels non pivotal

the role of theoretical restrictions in forecasting with inverse demand models in recent years the theoretical restrictions of consumer demand have been examined in post sample forecasting exercises however this work has uniformly ignored the concavity restrictions of consumer demand in this paper we evaluate a series of normalized quadratic inverse demand system nqids specifications using rolling windows and generating one to four step ahead forecasts to estimate the models eleven categories of south atlantic fish are used from 1980 through 2001 in addition to the nqids we also examine the forecasting performance of a purely time series model we find that the best predictions are achieved using a composite forecast

modeling the demand for alcoholic beverages and advertising specifications in this paper the demand for beer wine spirits and soft drinks in ontario is modeled in two parts an equation is specified to endogenize group expenditures and a demand system is set up to allocate budgeted group expenditures across types of beverages advertising is allowed to influence both the level of group expenditures and its allocation three popular advertising specifications are compared using the j test and the likelihood dominance criterion even though all three specifications fitted well according to standard criteria the calculated expenditure price and advertising elasticities were sensitive to the manner with which advertising is specified this clearly highlights the need to rely on a sound criterion to identify a dominant specification from the identified dominant specification we found that advertising has very subtle effects on expenditures on alcoholic beverages group and individual beverages thus advertising is not effective in enlarging markets and this suggests that firms especially breweries use advertising to compete in zero sum market share games from a public policy perspective our results are comforting but future research should investigate whether the neutral effect of advertising on aggregated expenditures hide substantial offsetting changes in the drinking habits of individuals 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

household equivalence scales and welfare comparisons abstract the ratio of cost functions of different households facing the same prices and attaining the same utility level is a true cost of demographic characteristics index this index is independent of a base level of income or utility ib if and only if it equals a ratio of household equivalence scales that are themselves ib applied cost index and equivalence scales specifications are usually ib this paper describes the general restrictions on cost functions and social welfare functions required for ib scales and for their use in welfare analysis

the advantage of tying one s hands ems discipline and central bank credibility abstract it is often argued that the ems is an effective disciplinary device for inflation prone countries in europe since it forces the respective policy makers to pursue more restrictive monetary policies than they would otherwise it is not clear however why these countries should submit themselves to such discipline this paper argues that to answer this question appropriately one must consider that ems membership brings potentially large credibility gains policy makers in inflation prone countries the reason is that not only it attaches an extra penalty to inflation in terms of real appreciation but makes the public aware that the policy maker is faced with such penalty and thus helps to overcome the inefficiency stemming from the public s mistrust of the authorities

aids translog and the gorman polar form abstract all budget share models that are linear in the log of income can be derived from gorman polar form subutility functions implications of this result for two stage budgeting lifetime utility maximization and social welfare calculations are discussed

abuse of dominance and licensing of intellectual property patent thickets layers of licenses a firm needs to be able to offer products that embody technologies owned by multiple firms and licensing policies have drawn increasing scrutiny from policy makers patent thickets involve complementary products which gives rise to double marginalization the so called royalty stacking problem and has the potential to retard diffusion of new technologies and reduce consumer welfare this paper examines the impact of licensing policies of one or more upstream owners essential intellectual property ip on the downstream firms that require access to that ip the terms under which downstream firms can access this ip affects entry decisions product diversity prices and welfare we consider both the case in which a single party controls the essential ip and the case in which different parties control complementary pieces of essential ip we compare the outcome of several alternative standard licensing arrangements such as flat rate access fees royalty percentages per unit fees patent pools and cross licensing arrangements with or without vertical integration we first consider the case where there is a single upstream owner of essential ip increasing the number of licenses enhances product variety which creates added value but it also intensifies downstream competition which dissipates profits we derive conditions under which the upstream ip monopoly will then want to provide an excessive or insufficient number of licenses relative to the number that maximizes consumer surplus or social welfare when there are multiple owners of essential ip royalty stacking can reduce the number of the downstream licensees but also the downstream equilibrium prices the consumers face the paper derives conditions determining whether this reduction in downstream price and variety is beneficial to consumers or society finally the paper explores the impact of alternative licensing policies with fixed license fees or royalties expressed as a percentage of the price an upstream ip owner cannot control the intensity of downstream competition in contrast volume based license fees i e per unit access fees do permit an upstream owner to control downstream competition and to replicate the outcome of complete integration the paper also shows that vertical integration can have little impact on downstream competition and licensing terms when ip owners charge fixed or volume based access fees

demand for dairy products in the eu abstract in the eu dairy sector given the remaining high protective tariffs and the quota system the main factor that drives dairy product market prices is the demand this paper evaluates the development of demand in the eu and presents estimates of consumption trends and forecasts for the future as well as estimates of elasticity with respect to prices and income in two major eu consumer countries france and italy we use two methods to estimate the development of demand for dairy products one based on a multi stage demand system and another based on a single trend equation the two methods generally lead to the same qualitative results but trend projections are larger using the demand system approach which is based on a shorter data period this difference is thus partly explained by the fact that high trend projections are not sustainable over a long period the results show a decreasing consumption of butter and fluid milk and an overall growth in protein and fat consumption nevertheless the increase in fat consumption should be more moderate than the consumption of protein the results also show that the demand for dairy products is relatively price inelastic but is more sensitive to changes in income especially for butter and cheese categories as shown by the use of a partial equilibrium model of dairy markets the likely impact of the cap reform strongly depends on the development of demand for dairy products in the eu more research effort on demand analysis is therefore crucial in order to assess the impact of reforms or trade negotiations more accurately and effectively

exchange rate stabilization in the erm identifying european monetary policy reactions abstract we develop the structural var models for european countries france denmark and germany during the erm period to examine the monetary policy reactions especially the within erm exchange rate stabilization in addition to analyzing the impulse responses and variance decomposition we present the full monetary reaction function in an interpretable manner without introducing additional assumptions the results suggest some asymmetry in exchange rate stabilization non german exchange rate stabilization is stronger than german exchange rate stabilization but do not support the hypothesis that german monetary policy was independent of the erm

the semiflexible almost ideal demand system abstract the concept of a semiflexible functional form is applied to the almost ideal ai demand system this yields a demand model that is more parsimonious than standard ones while preserving a degree of flexibility that satisfies the curvature property of concavity of the underlying expenditure function at least locally and that preserves the desirable properties of the ai model aggregation across consumers and nonlinearity of the engel curves the model is illustrated with an application to a relatively large demand system emphasizing food consumption

flexible and semiflexible consumer demands with quadratic engel curves in this paper we introduce three flexible consumer demand systems in which expenditures on goods are quadratic functions of income we view these alternatives as to the demand systems used heretofore in the empirical modeling of rank three demands namely those in which expenditure shares are quadratic functions of the logarithm of income curvature conditions required by theory can be imposed locally during the estimation for each and a semiflexible version can be estimated for illustrative purposes we estimate various forms of two of the systems using canadian data on seven categories of goods for the period 1947 to 1995

food stamps and the market demand for food this article compares estimates of disaggregated market food demand responses to the supplemental nutrition assistance program benefits based on exact nonlinear aggregation to responses based on linear aggregation by accounting for income inequality nonlinear aggregation implies that only the households that receive benefits contribute to market demand responses in contrast linear aggregation presumes all households receive benefits and thus contribute to the market demand response the consequence is that nonlinear market estimates are smaller than the linear estimates by roughly the fraction of households that receive benefits

some simple but flexible differential consumer demand systems abstract three differential consumer demand systems are proposed each of which has some particular advantages over the well known rotterdam model in each demand equation only two explanatory variables are used real income and the relative own price the features of the most preferred model are piglog working leser engel curves a limited number of parameters while no preference independence is assumed and easy estimation by iterated ols taking into account all theoretical restrictions even in case of a large number of commodities

fees versus royalties and the private value of a patent we compare how much profit an owner of a patented cost reducing invention can realize by licensing it to an oligopolistic industry producing a homogeneous product by means of a fixed fee or a per unit royalty our analysis is conducted in terms of a noncooperative game involving n 1 players the inventor and the n firms in this game the inventor acts as a stackelberg leader and it has a unique subgame perfect equilibrium in pure strategies it is shown that licensing by means of a fixed fee is superior to licensing by means of a royalty for both the inventor and consumers only a drastic innovation is licensed to a single producer

rational and self fulfilling balance of payments crises speculative attacks on a pegged exchange rate must sometimes occur ifasset price paths are to be free of abnormal profit opportunities suchattacks are fully rational as they reflect the market s response to aregime breakdown that is inevitable the authors shows that under someexpectations about policy balance of payments crises can also be purely self fulfilling events in such cases even a permanently viableregime may collapse and the economy will possess multiple equilibriacorresponding to different subjective assessments of the probability ofa crisis the behavior of the domestic interest rate will naturally reflect the possibility of a speculative attack copyright 1986 by american economic association

on licensing policies in bertrand competition abstract three licensing policies the auction the fee and the royalty are studied in a bertrand type duopoly with differentiated goods the analysis is conducted in terms of a multistage noncooperative game involving an external patentee and two firms each producing a differentiated good in bertrand price competition a principal finding is that for a patentee the royalty may be superior to the other two policies journal of economic literature classification numbers 026 611 621

licensing a new product with non linear contracts this paper looks at a situation where a licensor owns a patent on a technology that allows the production of a new good the licensor seeks to license its innovation to a set of producers that differ according to their marginal cost of producing an existing good we show that the licensor is able to obtain the profit a monopolist would achieve by producing the new good the equilibrium licensing contract specifies both a fixed fee and a royalty scheme based on the production of a licensee le memoire examine la situation ou un detenteur de brevet sur une technologie qui permet de produire un nouveau bien cherche a ceder une autorisation d exploiter cette innovation a un ensemble de producteurs qui ont differents couts marginaux de production d un bien existant on montre que le detenteur de brevet est capable d obtenir le profit qu un monopoleur obtiendrait en produisant le nouveau bien le contrat de licence d equilibre specifie a la fois un paiement forfaitaire et un arrangement de royautes sur la base du volume de production de l exploitant

how to license intangible property we examine the optimal licensing strategy of a research lab selling to firms who are product market competitors we consider an independent lab as well as a research joint venture we show that 1 demands are interdependent and hence the standard price mechanism is not the profit maximizing licensing strategy 2 the seller s incentives to develop the innovation may be excessive 3 the seller s incentives to disseminate the innovation typically are too low 4 larger ventures are less likely to develop the innovation and more likely to restrict its dissemination in those cases where development occurs and 5 a downstream firm that is not a member of the research venture is worse off as a result of the innovation

non stationarity and the import demand for virgin olive oil in the european union the aim of this study is to analyse the importation of virgin olive oil to european union countries paying special attention to the spanish export contribution the method used is based on the estimation of an imports demand system the novelty of the paper lies not in the modelling approach but in the explicit consideration of the univariate characteristics of series that is included in the analysis since prices are non stationary cointegration among them has been tested results indicate that they are cointegrated and that homogeneity holds as a result relative prices are included in the imports demand system structural change is also considered so as to account for the entrance of both spain and greece into the eu during the period studied results demonstrate the leadership of spain within the eu virgin olive oil market as well as the increasing competitiveness of greek oil

the generalized composite commodity theorem and food demand estimation this article reports tests of aggregation over consumer food products and estimates of aggregate food demand elasticities evidence that food demand variables follow unit root processes leads us to build on and simplify existing tests of the generalized composite commodity theorem we compute food demand elasticities using a method of cointegration that is shown to apply to a convenient but nonlinear functional form estimates are based on consumer reported expenditure data rather than commercial disappearance data appropriately specified models of consumer demand are central to market analysis it has been established that a valid equilibrium for markets characterized by diverse firms or diverse consumer products depends on downward sloping composite demand curves heiner braulke wohlgenant or on valid indirect utility functions chavas and cox given the large number of consumer food products food demand and price analysis must be implemented at some level of product aggregation improper aggregation can lead to biased estimates of welfare loss associated with public policies biased estimates of consumer and derived demand elasticities and misleading tests of market power testing for consistent aggregation over food products and estimating aggregate consumer food demand elasticities are the subjects of this article by far the most common justification for aggregation has been separable preferences one reason for its popularity has been the lack of a viable alternative tests of the composite commodity theorem hicks leontief lewbel are always rejected because it restricts relative prices within a group to remain fixed over time on the other hand aggregation based on weak separability is often rejected diewert and wales eales and unnevehr

asymmetric monetary policy effects in emu this paper develops a semi structural modelling approach to study asymmetric monetary transmission in europe a system of dynamic equations containing reaction functions for monetary policy as well as output gap and inflation equations is simultaneously estimated for france germany and italy we find asymmetries on the demand side in the strength of interest rate transmission and on the supply side in the effects of the output gap on inflation the responses are similar in germany and italy and generally stronger than in france out of sample tests do not find a structural break in the transmission mechanisms prior to the establishment of the european monetary union

seasonal protection of f v imports in the eu impacts of the entry price system the measures of border protection applied by the european union eu to imports of fruits and vegetables fv are complex and usually not well represented in trade models not only because of the range of instruments still constraining trade but also because of product differentiation and seasonality in these products this article assesses the impact of eliminating entry price ep constraints applied to a group of fv products the proposed model is of a partial equilibrium nature and takes seasonality into account we have applied the model to imports of tomatoes cucumbers clementines and table grapes trade impacts of eliminating ep are significant for particular origins during specific seasons most notably for moroccan tomatoes the volumes and prices of products originating in the eu experience moderate reductions

cost of characteristics indices and household equivalence scales abstract the ratio of cost functions of demographically different households is a true cost of demographic characteristics index this index is independent of a base level of income or utility ib if and only if it equals a ratio of household equivalence scales that are themselves ib this paper analyzes the restrictions on cost functions and commodity specific equivalence scales required for the existence of ib scales and indices since scales can be price dependent the restrictions on behavior are far less severe than for ordinary engel style household scales connections between ib scales and other techniques for incorporating demographic effects into demand systems are described

the welfare effects and the distributive impact of carbon taxation on italian households in this work the welfare effects and the distributive impact on italian households of the italian carbon tax are calculated the carbon tax has been introduced in italy at the beginning of 1999 asking for smooth increases over a number of years in the prices of most fossil fuels its welfare effects have been calculated using true cost of living index numbers and the compensating variation the parameters have been obtained through estimation of a complete almost ideal demand system using households data from 1985 to 1996 the welfare loss turns out to be quite substantial and affects italian households in a non negligible way but the distribution of welfare losses across different levels of total monthly expenditures does not allow sustaining the regressivity of carbon taxation as the effect becomes bigger as we move up the income distribution this evidence might encourage the use of carbon taxes at least in the transport sector as cost effective instruments of environmental policy especially after the ratification of the kyoto protocol on climate change