This paper shows how a specific tax—in contrast to an ad valorem tax—alters industry structure and firm-level performance in a monopolistic competition framework, where firms chose product quality endogenously and differ exogenously in productivity (i.e., marginal production efficiency). Industry equilibrium mechanisms and selection based on productivity play a significant role: A specific tax shifts market shares and profits toward firms with costs and prices above the industry average at the expense of low-cost firms. This reallocation of market shares releases a novel scale effect such that low-cost firms may quality downgrade, while high-cost firms always quality upgrade. There exists a parameter subspace, where this combines to a decrease on average quality for the industry. In comparison: An ad valorem tax only reduces the number of firms/varieties in the industry due to demand absorption, but affects neither firm-level performance nor industry structure.

中文翻译：

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从量税、不对称成本和内生质量

本文展示了从量税（与从价税相比）如何在垄断竞争框架中改变行业结构和企业层面的绩效，其中企业内生地选择产品质量，而生产率（即边际生产效率）外生不同。行业均衡机制和基于生产力的选择发挥着重要作用：特定税收将市场份额和利润转移到成本和价格高于行业平均水平的公司，而牺牲低成本公司。这种市场份额的重新分配释放了一种新的规模效应，使得低成本企业可能质量下降，而高成本企业总是质量升级。存在一个参数子空间，这会导致行业平均质量下降。相比下：