Pastoral economics within the framework of a social economy

Eucken, in his paradigm of a functionally competitive social market economy, established the basis for a free market economy which institutionalizes concerns for economic and social justice. The Bishops’ Pastoral (and also the Lay Letter) on the U.S. economy approach the concept of a social and just economy from a Christian moral tradition. A community of interests between these two approaches, as well as Donaldson’s synthesis of Nozick’s and Rawl’s theories of justice, causes a moral-economic dialogue and cross fertilization to emerge. The Bishops postulate that the evolution of a just and fair market economy, as the guarantor of freedom, human dignity, and justice, cannot be left to chance but needs to be consciously guided. Therefore, they emphasize the integration of economic theories and policies with notions of “fairness” and “justice,” advocating a holistic approach in viewing the economic system as an organic whole. This paper shows that the broad economic guidelines, which Bishops suggest, fall within the framework of a functional market economy, i.e., a social market economy. It does not deal with the religious and biblical arguments of the Pastoral Letter.     

Food Industry Firms' Economic Incentives to Provide Nutritional Information to the Market: European Breakfast Cereals,Snacks, and Soft Drinks Industries

Information asymmetries between producers and consumers exist with respect to nutritional characteristics of foods and beverages. This article aims to analyze firms' methods to supply nutritional information, focusing on 3 specific food industries: breakfast cereals, snacks, and soft drinks. A theoretical model is developed and tested empirically on European firm-level data obtained from company websites. Firms' incentives to provide nutritional information are positively related to their products' healthfulness, to firm size, and to firms' degree of international orientation. These insights may have important implications for the design of regulations to increase efficiency in the supply of nutritional information to consumers.     

Moments of cross-sectional stock market returns and the German business cycle

Based on monthly data covering the period from 1987 to 2021, we analyse whether cross-sectional moments of stock market returns may provide information about the future position of the German business cycle. We apply in-sample forecasting regressions with and without leading indicators as control variables, pseudo-out-of-sample exercises, autoregressive distributed lag models, and impulse-response functions estimated by local projections. We find in-sample predictive power of the first and third cross-section moments for the future growth of industrial production, even if one controls for well-established leading indicators for the German business cycle. Out-of-sample tests show that these variables reduce the relative mean squared error compared with benchmark models. We do not find a long-run relation between the moment series and industrial production. The dynamic response of industrial production to a shock on the cross-section moments is in line with the other results.