To go or not to go,that is the question: Using social influence to reduce hot beverage cup waste

ABSTRACT

While most consumers today feel concerned by environmental issues, the consumption of hot beverage in disposable cups remains very important. In this study, we use influence strategies related to social norms to reduce these behaviors and get consumers to consume their hot beverage in reusable cups. 14373 orders were analyzed and demonstrate that normative messages can be effective to change consumer behavior toward a more responsible choices.     

Tests of Normality of Functional Data

The paper is concerned with testing normality in samples of curves and error curves estimated from functional regression models. We propose a general paradigm based on the application of multivariate normality tests to vectors of functional principal components scores. We examine finite sample performance of a number of such tests and select the best performing tests. We apply them to several extensively used functional data sets and determine which can be treated as normal, possibly after a suitable transformation. We also offer practical guidance on software implementations of all tests we study and develop large sample justification for tests based on sample skewness and kurtosis of functional principal component scores.     

A Geometrical Interpretation of Collinearity: A Natural Way to Justify Ridge Regression and Its Anomalies

Justifying ridge regression from a geometrical perspective is one of the main contributions of this paper. To the best of our knowledge, this question has not been treated previously. This paper shows that ridge regression is a particular case of raising procedures that provide greater flexibility by transforming the matrix X associated with the model. Thus, raising procedures, based on a geometrical idea of the vectorial space associated with the columns of matrix X , lead naturally to ridge regression and justify the presence of the well-known constant k on the main diagonal of matrix X ^′ X . This paper also analyses and compares different alternatives to raising with respect to collinearity mitigation. The results are illustrated with an empirical application.     

Contradictions of the Climate-Friendly City: New Perspectives on Eco-Gentrification and Housing Justice

As local governments and corporations promote ‘climate friendliness’, and a low-carbon lifestyle becomes increasingly desirable, more middle- and upper-income urban residents are choosing to live near public transit, on bike- and pedestrian-friendly streets, and in higher-density mixed-use areas. This rejection of classical forms of suburbanization has, in part, increased property values in neighborhoods offering these amenities, displacing lower-income, often non-white, residents. Increased prevalence of creative and technology workers appears to accelerate this trend. We argue that a significant and understudied socio-environmental contradiction also occurs where the actual environmental outcomes of neighborhood transformation may not be what we expect. New research on greenhouse gas emissions shows that more affluent residents have much larger carbon footprints because of their consumption, even when reductions in transportation or building energy emissions are included. We describe an area in Seattle, Washington, the location of Amazon's headquarters, experiencing this contradiction and show a distinct convergence of city investments in low-carbon infrastructure, significant rises in housing prices and decreases in lower-income and non-white residents. We conclude with a discussion of a range of issues that require more attention by scholars interested in housing justice and/or urban sustainability.     

Analyzing credit risk transmission to the nonfinancial sector in Europe: A network approach

We use a factor model and elastic net shrinkage to model a high-dimensional network of European credit default swap (CDS) spreads. Our empirical approach allows us to assess the joint transmission of bank and sovereign risk to the nonfinancial corporate sector. Our findings identify a sectoral clustering in the CDS network, where financial institutions are in the center and nonfinancial entities as well as sovereigns are grouped around the financial center. The network has a geographical component reflected in different patterns of real-sector risk transmission across countries. Our framework also provides dynamic estimates of risk transmission, a useful tool for systemic risk monitoring.     

MORE THAN A FEELING: CONFIDENCE,UNCERTAINTY, AND MACROECONOMIC FLUCTUATIONS

Economists, observers, and policy-makers often emphasize the role of sentiment as a potential driver of the business cycle. In this paper, we provide three contributions to this debate. First, we give an overview of the recent literature on the nexus between sentiment (considering both confidence and uncertainty) and economic activity. Second, we review existing empirical measures of sentiment, in particular consumer confidence, stock market volatility (SMV) and Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU), on monthly data for 27 countries, 1985–2016. Third, we identify some new stylized facts based on international evidence. While different measures are surprisingly lowly correlated on average in each country, they are typically highly positively correlated across countries, suggesting the existence of a global factor or sizeable international spillovers of sentiment. Consumer confidence has the closest co-movement with economic and financial variables, and most of the correlations are contemporaneous or forward-looking, consistent with the view that economic sentiment is indeed a driver of activity.     

Disentangling the drivers of renewable energy investments: The role of behavioral factors

The scope of this study is to investigate the main determinants of renewable energy investments in Greece. For this reason, we build an appropriate framework to infer the decision‐making process in the renewable energy sources (RES). The main drivers are then categorized under two groups as economic, and behavioral ones. In the next stage, we rely on binomial (logit and probit) and quantile regression analysis to estimate the impact of these factors on investment decisions towards RES. Our findings indicate that investors who gain better access to knowledge and exhibit a more positive attitude towards the contribution of artificial intelligence (AI) on the RES industry have a higher share of renewables in their portfolio. We argue that these investors are willing to invest a higher amount in the RES industry today. At the same time, quantile regression models illustrate that this relationship is nonmonotonic (i.e., inverted U shaped curve), arguing that positive attitudes towards the contribution of behavioral factors on RES are not adequate to encourage investments after crossing a certain point (threshold). Based on the empirical findings, we argue that the message to policymakers and government officials is to promote a faster penetration of low carbon technologies to achieve sustainable economic and social growth.     

Influence of European Law on Argentinian Consumer Law

Journal of Consumer Policy - This article provides an overview on the social and political contexts of the rise of consumer legislation in Argentina, on the development of consumer law in Argentina...     

An Introduction to the Issue of Consumer Law in South America

Journal of Consumer Policy - This Special Issue has a long history. It goes back to a conference in July 2017 organized by Cláudia Lima Marques in Porto Alegre Brazil, the first of the Center...     

Growth Effects of Fiscal Decentralization: Empirical Evidence from China's Provinces

In this paper, we revisit the fiscal decentralization-economic growth nexus in the case of China's provinces using autoregressive distributed lag bounds tests and pooled mean group estimators with time series data from the period 1979-2009. Using principal component analysis, we build a novel composite fiscal decentralization indicator consisting of five different fiscal decentralization measures and use it in the models in addition to conventional fiscal decentralization variables. The results suggest that there is a strong, positive, and statistically significant relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth in most provinces in China in both the short run and the long run.