For each of your answers to Exercise 12.2, will equilibrium price rise or fall or stay the same?

Short Answer

Expert verified

(a) The equilibrium price will rise if firm pays fine.

(b) The equilibrium price will rise if firm is sued for polluting water.

(c) The equilibrium price remains same if power plants are not required to address impact of air quality emission.

(d) The equilibrium price remains same if companies use fracking.

Step by step solution

01

Equilibrium price :

The equilibrium price is the price where the quantity of supply of goods meets the quantity of demand for commodities.

02

(a) Explanation : 

If businesses are obliged to pay a higher penalty for generating carbon dioxide, prices will rise, causing supply to go out of balance, resulting in a decrease in demand.

If a producer is penalized, the increased cost will be passed on to the customer, who will then expect less. This would result in a very high equilibrium price.

03

(b) Explanation : 

If firms are fined an additional amount for polluting the river, the equilibrium price will rise because the producer would offer each product with a rider fine charge, resulting in decreasing customer demand.

04

(c) Explanation : 

If a power plant in a certain city is not obligated to monitor or handle air quality emissions, the producer's market supply will remain unchanged, and the consumer's demand would remain unchanged.

It will have no effect if the producer is not fined or addressed as a result of their air quality emissions. Hence, the equilibrium price remains unchanged.

05

(d) Explanation :

There would be no change in demand and supply if companies used fracking to extract oil and gas from the rock and were required to clean up the mess. There would be no price change as a result of this.

If the price is low and the producer has absorbed it rather than passing it on to the customer, the supply and demand for the product will remain unchanged, resulting in no change in the equilibrium price. However, if the corporation passes on the additional cost to the customers, the equilibrium price will alter.

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Most popular questions from this chapter

What is the difference between private costs and social costs?

Consider two ways of protecting elephants from poachers in African countries. In one approach, the government sets up enormous national parks that have sufficient habitat for elephants to thrive and forbids all local people to enter the parks or to injure either the elephants or their habitat in any way. In a second approach, the government sets up the national parks and designates 10villages around the edges of the park as official tourist centers that become places where tourists can stay and bases for guided tours inside the national park. Consider the different incentives of local villagers - who often are very poor - in each of these plans. Which plan seems more likely to help the elephant population?

Classify the following pollution-control policies as command-and-control or market incentive-based.

a. A state emissions tax on the quantity of carbon emitted by each firm.

b. The federal government requires domestic auto companies to improve car emissions by 2020.

c. The EPA sets national standards for water quality.

d. A city sells permits to firms that allow them to emit a specified quantity of pollution.

e. The federal government pays fishermen to preserve salmon.

What does a point inside the production possibility frontier represent?

The state of Colorado requires oil and gas companies who use fracking techniques to return the land to its original condition after the oil and gas extractions. Table 12.9shows the total cost and total benefits (in dollars) of this policy.

Table12.9

Land Restored (in acres)Total CostTotal Benefit
0\(0\)0
100\(20\)140
200\(80\)240
300\(160\)320
400\(280\)380

(a) Calculate the marginal cost and the marginal benefit at each quantity (acre) of land restored. See Production, Costs and Industry Structure if you need a refresher on how to calculate marginal costs and benefits.

b. If we apply marginal analysis, what is the optimal amount of land to be restored?

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