Charity registration and reporting: a cross-jurisdictional and theoretical analysis of regulatory impact

Governments increasingly regulate charities to restrict the number of organizations claiming taxation exemptions, reduce charities’ ability to abuse state support, and detect and deter fraud. Public interest theory arguments suggest that regulation could increase philanthropy through enhancing public trust and confidence in charities. Nevertheless, public choice theory argues that regulators seek to maximize political returns, ‘manage’ charity-government relationships, and reduce potential regulatory capture.

We analyse charity regulatory regimes using these two regulatory theories and the relative costs and benefits of different regulatory regimes. Heeding these should reduce regulatory inefficiency and balance accountability and transparency demands against benefits charities receive from regulation.     

Viewpoint: Regulating meat consumption to improve health,the environment and animal welfare

Meat consumption has increased significantly in the last 50 years. This trend raises various health and environmental issues, as well as moral concerns regarding farm animal welfare. In this paper, we discuss the regulation of meat consumption in developed countries. Specifically, we discuss possible justifications for this regulation in terms of environmental, health and animal welfare considerations, as well as the effect of fiscal, informational and behavioral regulatory instruments. Finally, we present a list of challenges that policy makers and food scholars may need to confront in the future.     

Institutional Economics as Theory of Policy Change: Impact of Past Policy Failures on Present Policy

Social scientists have developed several theories for understanding or evaluating policy change over time. Since all costs or benefits are not internalized owing to positive transaction costs, policymaking is always implemented under cost underestimation conditions and, therefore, is imperfect. I call this trait policy failure in this article. Furthermore, I show that a new framework combining the social costs approach and the legal/economic approach in institutional economics is suitable and can be applied to evaluating how past policy failures affect present policy, providing as an example the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.     

Consistent inference in fixed-effects stochastic frontier models

The classical stochastic frontier panel data models provide no mechanism to disentangle individual time invariant unobserved heterogeneity from inefficiency. Greene (2005a, b) proposed the so-called “true” fixed-effects specification that distinguishes these two latent components. However, due to the incidental parameters problem, his maximum likelihood estimator may lead to biased variance estimates. We propose two alternative estimators that achieve consistency for $n\to \infty$ with fixed $T$. Furthermore, we extend the Chen et al. (2014) results providing a feasible estimator when the inefficiency is heteroskedastic and follows a first-order autoregressive process. We investigate the behavior of the proposed estimators through Monte Carlo simulations showing good finite sample properties, especially in small samples. An application to hospitals’ technical efficiency illustrates the usefulness of the new approach.     

The Role of Inflation Target Adjustment in Stabilization Policy

How and under what circumstances can adjusting the inflation target serve as a stabilization-policy tool and contribute to welfare improvement? We answer these questions quantitatively with a standard New Keynesian model that includes cost-push-type shocks. Our proposed inflation target rule calls for the target to be adjusted in a persistent manner and in the opposite direction to the realization of a cost-push shock, which is essentially a makeup strategy. The inflation target rule, combined with a Taylor-type rule, significantly reduces inflation fluctuations originating from cost-push shocks and mitigates the stabilization trade-off, resulting in a similar level of welfare to that associated with the Ramsey optimal policy.     

Price Effects on Compound Commodities

We examine the effect of simultaneous price changes on the total demand for a group of goods, which we call a compound commodity. Specifically, we consider unit and proportional cost components (e.g., taxes, transportation costs) imposed on compound commodities. If the unit cost is positive, then the proportional cost raises the relative price of the more expensive good, and thus induces substitution towards the less expensive good within this group. Then, the substitution effect of the proportional cost for a compound commodity is non‐negative if and only if the compound commodity and the other goods are, on average, not strongly substitutable.     

The Impact of Sustainability Aspects in the Meat Sector: A Cluster Analysis Based on Consumer Attitudes and Store Format Choice

Several consumer studies have shown considerable market potential for sustainable meat products, however, their markets shares are still marginal. In Germany, the sustainable aspects “organic,” “local origin,” and “animal welfare” are of special interest. To obtain a precise overview of potential target groups for these meat categories and their choice of store format, 620 German consumers were surveyed on their attitudes toward sustainable meat production and their shopping behavior. First, target groups based on consumers’ attitudes were identified by cluster analysis, taking into account possible overlaps. Consumers were also clustered by their store format choice and their preferred type of meat packaging. A cross tabulation of the results then provided insights into which store format and type of meat packaging is preferred by the target groups for sustainable meat products. Due to overlaps found in the target groups, the existence of important subgroups was shown. Amongst the target groups, only a slight preference for unpackaged meat products was found. Basically, the offer of sustainable meat products appears of interest for all store formats, with particular emphasis on supermarkets. The results of this study can support producers and retailers developing new and tailored marketing strategies for sustainable meat products.     

Equitable preference relations on infinite utility streams

We propose generalized versions of strong equity and Pigou–Dalton transfer principle. We study the existence and the real-valued representation of social welfare relations satisfying these two generalized equity principles. Our results characterize the restrictions on one period utility domains for the equitable social welfare relations (i) to exist; and (ii) to admit real-valued representations.     

Financial development,portfolio investments and the real economy in Africa

According to the conservative view, capital flows enhance economic growth. Focussing on Africa’s real economy, this study investigates the linkage between portfolio investments and real sector growth, and whether financial sector development strengthens this association. The study covers 30 countries over the period 1990–2017. We adopt the Lewbel instrumental variable general method of moments (IV-GMM) two-step robust estimator, which relies on heteroscedasticity for identification, while dealing with instrument insufficiency, unavailability, endogeneity and omitted variable bias. We found that portfolio equity has no growth impact on Africa’s real sector. Debt flows deter the growth of the overall real sector as well as the manufacturing and industrial sectors, but have no impact on agriculture and service growth. We found that financial development does strengthen the positive association between capital flows and economic growth, but this is dependent on the type of sector and portfolio investment, as well as on the degree of financial development. We control for known determinants of economic growth.