A quantity surcharge occurs when a larger package costs more per unit than a smaller one. Although counterintuitive, such surcharges are common in supermarket pricing. Using manually collected price data from 1,491 product-type-store observations across 38 New Zealand supermarkets, we document their prevalence and distribution. Quantity surcharges affect roughly one in four products, a rate comparable to international evidence. Contrary to our initial expectation, they appear less prevalent in rich neighbourhoods. They also vary sharply across product categories.
Immigration into New Zealand has recently been at an all-time high, while relative to incomes the country's housing market is one of the least affordable in the OECD. Using public release census data from 1991 to 2018, we estimate immigration's impact on rental costs at Area Unit level relative to domestic population growth or migration. We instrument for immigration using previous settlement. In our most credible specification, a percentage point increase in immigrant share raised local rents by a modest 0.91 percent relative to domestic population increase. Results persist using the broader Ward level, clustering standard errors, using sparse controls or spatial lags, but not when dropping the 2018 census. We find the effect is significant for Wellington but not for other major centres, nor for low-income or -education receiving areas. Effects are strongest for immigrants originating in Europe or Asia, and those having lived in New Zealand ten or more years.
This paper examines the fairness case for taxing real capital gains tax in New Zealand. A capital gains tax doubles taxes real capital gains arising from permanently retaining some of the asset's earnings. Also, real capital gains not due to retention of earnings lower the business's overall tax rate in the absence of a capital gains tax, but the current owners of the assets do not benefit from this because the prices they paid for the assets would have reflected the tax regime. Furthermore, some of the burden of a capital gains tax would fall on current owners of the assets through a reduction in the value of their assets, but none of the burden would fall upon future owners despite them paying the tax because the prices they would pay for the assets would reflect the new tax regime. Accordingly, capital gains tax does not satisfy the fairness test.
This paper studies valuation under usage-timing uncertainty for random-time-use goods, defined as goods for which usage opportunities arrive at stochastic times. We model usage opportunities as a nonhomogeneous Poisson process and derive closed-form expressions for the expected present value of utility under constant, exponential, power-law, and oscillatory arrival rates. For oscillatory usage patterns, we show that the interaction between cycle frequency and discounting yields a phase-dependent ranking of feasible start dates, a phase-alignment premium, and a measure of the dollar-valued gain from switching between feasible start dates. An empirical application to backup-generator valuation demonstrates how observed power-interruption patterns translate into present-value upper bounds on the ownership costs a rational household should be willing to bear. The framework isolates demand-side usage-timing uncertainty, a dimension complementary to the supply-side deterioration and replacement problems emphasised in durable-goods models, and provides tools for acquisition, rental, and stockpiling decisions across household, business, and policy contexts.
