TY  - BOOK
AU  - Hutton,Eric
AU  - Whalley,John
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - Reference Point Dependence for Specification Bias from Quality Upgrading
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 1994///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - August 1994; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - This paper argues that whether estimates of the welfare cost of natural or artificial trade barriers that do not discriminate by quality are subject to positive or negative specification bias when using models which do not explicitly recognize quality variation depends on the reference point used in counterfactual equilibrium analysis.  We use numerical general equilibrium techniques to generate counter examples to the widely held view that (in the competitive case) incorporating quality upgrading will tend to reduce the welfare costs of quality invariant trade barriers.  To do this, we use a trade-distorted equilibrium as the reference point, rather than free trade
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w4816
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w4816
ER  -