Do Consumers Respond to Country-of-Origin Labelling?

Seafood was the first class of foods to fall under the 2002 US regulatory requirements for mandatory country-of-origin labelling (COOL). If this regulation created benefits for consumers, filling an information void by demanding information that the market did not, then there should have been an observable response in the demand for seafood. To gauge the impact, we examined markets most likely to respond. We estimated retail demand for shrimp, seafood that in the USA is largely sourced from Southeast Asia and has a history of raising food safety concerns. Our estimated demand systems included standard variables consistent with economic theory—price and expenditure changes, ongoing trends, and seasonality in consumption patterns. The demand systems also accounted for regulations that required country-of-origin labels for some, but not all, foods prior to COOL. Data came from a nationally representative panel of households that record retail food purchases, allowing us to construct relatively high-frequency market data suitable for testing for the presence of even short-lived impacts. Household demographic information allowed us to separately estimate demands by consumers most likely to respond to label information. The demand systems yielded reasonable price and expenditure elasticity estimates, but none of the variables related to COOL revealed evidence of an impact.     

Accounting Students’ Planning,Writing, and Performance on a Time‐Constrained Case Analysis: Effects of Self‐Talk and Prior Achievement

When writing a case analysis, most students first allocate time to plan the content and structure of their response, and then proceed to write with differing degrees of urgency, the outcomes of which are case responses of differing quality. This study examines the extent to which planning time influences writing urgency and, ultimately, the quality of case responses in a time‐constrained setting. It also investigates whether these behaviors and outcomes depend on students’ frame of mind, by experimentally inducing differing types of pre‐examination self‐talk. Analyses show that planning time was negatively associated with writing urgency; students who spent more time planning subsequently wrote with less urgency. Writing urgency was positively associated with case response quality and, after controlling for differences in writing urgency, planning time was positively associated with response quality. Results indicate that different planning and writing behaviors can be induced by different forms of self‐talk prior to the writing task. Relative to interrogative self‐talk (“Will I …?”), exclamatory self‐talk (“I will …!”) caused higher‐achieving students to spend more time planning, but then write with less urgency and subsequently produce lower‐quality case responses. Conversely, after engaging in exclamatory rather than interrogative self‐talk, lower‐achieving students spent less time planning but then wrote with greater urgency and produced higher‐quality responses. These results indicate that (i) planning significantly affects writing and performance, (ii) students can influence their own planning behavior through pre‐task self‐talk, but (iii) pre‐task self‐talk can be beneficial or detrimental depending on students’ prior achievement.     

Bundesbank intervention effects through interest rate policy

This paper investigates the effects of the changes in the Bundesbank's discount and Lombard interest rates on the volatility of European Union country exchange rates relative to the German mark during 1987–93. The first year of the sample period contains the last major realignment in the ERM before its ‘breakdown’ in 1993. Using a parsimonious EGARCH model, we find that the conditional volatility of these exchange rates increased in response to interest rate changes, regardless of the rate change direction. This finding is in direct conflict with Bundesbank's public statements that indicate that its interest rate policy was designed to calm its foreign exchange markets.     

The use of the Pareto shape parameter as a leading indicator of process safety performance

Metrics addressing process safety incident performance typically focus on frequency and severity statistics. Often, these lagging metrics are not overly sensitive to actual performance, making trending and forecasting difficult. This article presents the results from a statistical study of a large incident dataset where changes in the Pareto shape parameter were observed as a function of time. This approach has been found to give far better insight into process safety performance than traditional incident metrics and readily relates back to concepts such as the “incident triangle” and “layers of protection.” Through the application of this approach, trends within process safety incident performance have been observed earlier, and more accurate forecasting has allowed for the identification of anomalies. In turn, these critical observations have allowed for the better structuring and targeting of process safety programs. Although incident data are generally considered as a lagging indicator, this approach has clearly reduced the lag time associated with this type of data and has given valuable insight into the current status of process safety performance. © 2009 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 2009