Contributed Paper prepared for presentation at the International Association of Agricultural Economists Conference, Beijing, China, August 16-22, 2009

Contributed Paper prepared for presentation at the International Association of Agricultural Economists Conference, Beijing, China, August 16-22, 2009

The current obesity crisis in the United States is generating numerous alternative policy options for combating the problem. One alternative that has been widely proposed is an excise or sales tax on sugar-sweetened non-alcoholic beverages. This literature started out within a very simple...

and this is a problem when estimating log-linear gravity equations. This has caused many researchers to either ignore the zero trade flows or to replace the zero with a small positive number. Both of these actions bias the resulting parameter estimates of the gravity equation. In this study we...