Consumers’ valuation for food traceability in China: Does trust matter?

Food safety is a very important topic in China. We investigate Chinese consumers’ preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) for food traceability using a choice experiment. Given that consumers’ trust in the food system may affect their preferences and WTP, we also assess the interaction between consumers’ trust in government’s supervision of food safety and food labels and consumers’ preferences for traceable food products. Using data collected from a choice experiment on Fuji apples in a face-to-face survey in six Chinese cities, the results show that (i) consumers are willing to pay for traceable food but their valuations can differ upon the degree of their trust in government’s supervision of food safety and food labels; (ii) consumers are willing to pay for traceability with strong evidence of preference heterogeneity; (iii) government is not the most trusted safety inspection and certificate authority as found in prior studies using animal food products in China.     

ECONOMIC POLICY UNCERTAINTY EFFECTS ON CREDIT AND STABILITY OF FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

We examine policy‐related economic uncertainty effects on the availability of credit, non‐performing loans and loan loss provisions using a panel of 18 countries. We provide significant evidence that uncertainty reduces the availability of credit while leading to increases in banks' non‐performing loans and loan loss provisions, distorting sectoral stability. Our findings are economically meaningful.     

Interventions in Markets with Adverse Selection: Implications for Discount Window Stigma

I study the implications for central bank discount window stigma of a workhorse model of adverse selection in financial markets. In the model, firms (banks) need to borrow to finance a productive project. There is limited liability and firms have private information about their ability to repay their debts, which gives rise to the possibility of adverse selection. The central bank can ameliorate the impact of adverse selection by lending to firms. Discount window borrowing is observable and it may be taken as a signal of firms' credit worthiness. Under some conditions, firms borrowing from the discount window may pay higher interest rates to borrow in the market, a phenomenon often associated with the presence of stigma. I discuss these and other outcomes in detail and what they suggest about the relevance of stigma as an empirical phenomenon.     

Open Economy Dynamics in a Floating Exchange Rate Developing Country Context

ABSTRACT

This article develops a wavelet-based control model to simulate fiscal, monetary, and real exchange rate scenarios in an open economy developing country with an inflation-targeting regime. We use South African macro data to jointly simulate optimal fiscal and monetary policy under varying scenarios for real exchange rate stability with interest rate parity. As real exchange rate stability increases, the model simulates the effects on the trade balance under both a constant and depreciating real exchange rate. We find that short-term cycle stability problems are somewhat mitigated by allowing the real exchange rate to depreciate.     

Environmental Policy,Sustainable Development,Governance Mechanisms and Environmental Performance

We investigate the effects of environmental policy (Climate Change Act – CCA), sustainable development frameworks (Global Reporting Initiative – GRI; UN Global Compact – UNGC) and corporate governance (CG) mechanisms on environmental performance (carbon reduction initiatives – CRIs; actual carbon performance – GHG emissions) of UK listed firms. We use the generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation technique to analyse data consisting of 2245 UK firm‐year observations over the 2002–2014 period. First, we find that the CCA has a positive effect on CRIs, and this effect is stronger in better‐governed firms. Second, we find that the GRI‐based framework is positively associated with CRIs. Third, we find that firms with poor CG structures have lower actual carbon performance compared with their better‐governed counterparts. Overall, our evidence suggests that firms can symbolically conform to environmental policy (CCA) and sustainable development frameworks (GRI, UNGC) by engaging in CRIs without necessarily improving actual environmental performance (GHG emissions) substantively. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Do special issues offer something special? An overview of research trends in Telecommunications Policy special issues

This study explores the value of special issues by analyzing the characteristics of special issues of Telecommunications Policy (TP). Specifically, this study examines the status of special issue publications, the characteristics of their articles compared with those of general issues, and the factors affecting article citations. For the analysis, all information on TP articles published from 1976 to 2018 was collected from the Scopus database. A comparative analysis as well as a negative binomial regression were conducted on papers published after 1994, when the first special issue was published. The results show that special issues are distinguished from general issues by various characteristics, such as multinational author collaboration, number of references, keywords, and funding. While general issue papers are more frequently cited in academia, special issue papers show better performance in terms of online captures and social media sharing. Moreover, the smaller number of variables affects the frequency of citations in the case of special issues, revealing that content and format are more influential than author factors.     

Hen housing system information effects on U.S. egg demand

The U.S. egg industry has been moving rapidly towards “cage-free” aviary housing as an alternative to conventional cages for hens. A choice experiment was used to evaluate the U.S. public’s willingness to pay (WTP) for egg attributes including housing system, color, size, and certifying agency. A significant difference in WTP for hen housing systems was found using video information treatments describing hen housing systems. When respondents were shown videos of egg production systems, they were indifferent between cage-free aviary and the alternative enriched colony hen housing system whereas with no video information the respondents clearly preferred the cage-free system. Results point towards potential public misunderstanding of the costs and benefits associated with the “cage-free” egg label designation and highlight potential discrepancies between industry commitments and informed consumer preferences.     

Corruption in space: A closer look at the world's subnations

Corruption levels differ not only between but also within countries. In this paper we analyze spatial interdependencies in corruption levels for a large sample of 1232 subnational regions from 81 countries. Based on a spatial autoregressive model, which controls for country-fixed effects and corrects for spatial autocorrelation in the error term, we find that a subnational region's corruption level is positively correlated with neighboring subnational regions' corruption levels. Extending the core model and allowing for heterogeneous spatial effects, we find that most spillovers among subnational regions occur within national borders. Moreover, in particular high income subnational regions and subnational regions with relative low corruption levels tend to spill in space. This is due to their high degree of connectivity in terms of economic, sociocultural and political exchange with other subnational regions. Our estimation results underline the importance to consider not only a subnational region's own characteristics, but also spatial interdependencies when implementing efficient anti-corruption policies at the local level.     

安徽以增加知识价值为导向分配政策的实践研究

2017年10月,安徽省委省政府出台《关于实行以增加知识价值为导向分配政策的实施意见》。采取调查问卷的方式从五个方面跟踪总结了安徽省属高校院所对以增加知识价值为导向分配政策的执行情况,并对今后如何推动政策的进一步落实提出建议。     

Monetary policy and food inflation in South Africa: A quantile regression analysis

Although optimal monetary policy stabilizes food inflation theoretically, empirical studies remain limited not only in the context of volumes and the estimation approaches, but are focused on selected advanced and emerging countries to the neglect of Africa where poverty and dominance of food in the consumption basket are more pronounced. We provide empirical evidence in the context of South Africa using quantile regressions. Rising food prices are destabilized even further by restrictive monetary policy; a finding that has ramifications for inflation targeting, especially given that a quarter of the country’s population is food poor.