Consumer Quality Perception in Traditional Food: Parmigiano Reggiano Cheese

Abstract

The paper aims to classify the quality cues and attributes of grated Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, an Italian traditional food cheese, exploring if they affect consumers’ quality perceptions and expectations. Analysis is based on a questionnaire administered in hypermarkets where grated Parmigiano Reggiano is sold. A factor analysis, using varimax rotation, and a cluster analysis, were performed, using the Stata 12 software package. The clusters used were: geographical origin and packaging (cluster 1); price, brand and quality certification (cluster 2); all sensory attributes (cluster 3); and a combination of sensory attributes with price, brand, and quality certification (cluster 4). This is the first study to examine the quality cues and attributes affecting quality perception and expectations of cheese for grated Parmigiano Reggiano from a consumer perspective. It is also the first to classify cheese attributes following a quality approach, encompassing previously studied sensory and other attributes.     

Modern Pirates: How Arbitration Lawyers Help Corporations Seize National Assets and Limit State Autonomy

Large‐scale companies have worked for centuries with the governments of powerful nations to extract wealth from the rest of the world. Since the 1990s, one important method of continuing that legacy has been the use of secretive legal proceedings known as investor‐state dispute settlements (ISDS). Through this innocuous‐sounding practice, transnational corporations (TNCs) are able to blame foreign governments for their failure to extract as large a profit as they anticipated from their operations abroad. Asserting that changes in fiscal, environmental, or social policies have harmed them, TNCs have claimed that foreign governments should compensate them for the loss of potential revenues. ISDS tribunals have awarded billions of dollars as a result of such claims, mostly made under the auspices of bilateral investment treaties. Not only must governments spend millions of dollars defending themselves against assaults and tens or hundreds of millions if they lose their cases, but the ISDS system also has a chilling effect on the adoption of legislation designed to protect the health and safety of citizens. As a result of all the lawsuits in which corporations collect damages from governments under investment treaties, an array of groups in the legal industry have profited substantially: law firms representing corporate interests, arbitrators and other specialists in corporate arbitration, and litigation funders. The arbitration industry is, as a practical matter, the glue that holds the system together. The law firms involved in this industry do not wait passively for cases to arise. Instead, they actively pursue corporations to seek arbitration with governments, proselytize for the legitimacy of the current international investment regime, and block reforms that would limit arbitration opportunities. By creating methods of insulating TNCs from normal business risks and forcing host governments to bear the burden of liabilities, the arbitration system has effectively reinstituted a neo‐colonial regime through the judicial system.     

Gender and Promotions: Evidence from Academic Economists in France*

The promotion system for French academic economists provides an interesting environment to examine the promotion gap between men and women. Promotions occur through national competitions for which we have information both on candidates and on those eligible to be candidates. Thus, we can examine the two stages of the process: application and success. Women are less likely to seek promotion, and this accounts for up to 76 percent of the promotion gap. Being a woman also reduces the probability of promotion conditional on applying, although the gender difference is not statistically significant. Our results highlight the importance of the decision to apply.     

EMPLOYMENT STABILIZATION INSIDE FIRMS: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF WORKER COOPERATIVES

There is evidence that worker cooperatives provide a greater stabilization of employment compared to capital‐managed firms. While the reasons of this behaviour can be ascribed to their property and governance structure, less is known of the tools to put it into practice. I discuss two possible ways to guarantee employment insurance: by letting wages fluctuate, or by accumulating reinvested profits into an income stabilizing fund that copes with downturns without firing and without reducing wages. In this second case, I find out that asset locks play a wage smoothing role. This may explain the large share of profits that are reinvested in this indivisible and not appropriable fund. I provide evidence for this mechanism by means of original data at the firm level and of first‐hand collected survey data at the individual level on risk perception in a sample of Italian cooperatives.     

Revealing Incentives for Compatibility Provision in Vertically Differentiated Network Industries

We determine the incentives for compatibility provision of firms that produce network goods with different intrinsic qualities when firms do not have veto power over compatibility. When network effects are strong, there are multiple equilibria in pricing and consumer decisions. We show that in some equilibria, it is the high‐quality firm that invests in compatibility, whereas in others, the low‐quality firm triggers compatibility. The socially optimal compatibility degree is zero, except under very strong network effects, where one of the equilibria has all consumers buying the low‐quality good. In this case, a partial degree of compatibility is optimal.     

The development of IB as a scientific field

International business (IB) is today an established field in business studies with two professional associations and numerous academic publications. However, it is much younger than many other fields in the management area. Although economists were focusing on international issues even before, it was not until after the Second World War that IB started to emerge as a scientific field. The purpose of this paper is to analyse this development from the early days up to the present time. In so doing, using a theoretical framework, it focuses on the organizing of the field, i.e. how early informal contacts eventually led to the formation of formal organizations, the launching of journals, and with the passage of time the publishing of handbooks. The paper provides empirical evidence of all these steps. In this way it presents data on significant contributions to the field.     

Short- and long-run heterogeneous investment dynamics

In this paper, we model the dynamics of business investment taking into account asset-specific characteristics potentially affecting the reactivity of aggregate and disaggregate capital accumulation over the business cycle. We estimate Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and traditional investment (non-ICT) determinants within a Vector Error Correction Model testing the assumptions of the flexible accelerator and neoclassical model as well as the role of financial constraints and uncertainty. We evaluate our model on Italian data over the period 1980–2012, and we check our results also with Spanish and UK data. Our findings support the assumption that capital is heterogeneous since short- and long-run determinants are significantly different across the assets. Traditional assets experience stock adjustment costs while ICT investment incurs flow adjustment cost. In the short run, liquidity is a key determinant of investment independently of the asset type. In the long run, uncertainty significantly affects ICT. Finally, the results of the counterfactual exercises support the idea that ICT is a key policy variable to foster economic growth.     

Conditional Cash Transfer and School Outcomes: An Evaluation of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program in Davao Oriental,Philippines

The present study adds to the empirical literature examining the effects of conditional cash transfers on school outcomes. Using school‐level and student‐level enrolment data from Davao Oriental Philippines, we evaluate the influence of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (also known as 4Ps), a social development policy program, on the growth rates in school enrolment outcomes. The findings show that 4Ps, on average, increased school enrolment of children by 1.12 percent. It was also apparent that using student‐level data as opposed to school‐level data revealed a more robust effect of 4Ps on school outcomes. We also found some school and socioeconomic characteristics influencing the change in school enrolments. Finally, this study highlights the role of government intervention programs in improving access to education in the poorest sector of the economy.