How household food shopping behaviors changed during COVID-19 lockdown period: Evidence from Beijing,China

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a great impact on food shopping behavior. However, changes in food shopping behavior and related decision-making mechanisms remain unexplored. This study conducted a face-to-face questionnaire survey with 900 residents in three communities in Haidian, Beijing, China, to analyze food shopping behavior during the periods of pre-lockdown, lockdown (January–March 2020), and post-lockdown. Our results indicated that the preference for fresh food e-commerce shopping was accelerated by the lockdown with the usage rate increasing by 48%; the wet markets were seriously hit by the lockdown policy and had not fully recovered by the post-lockdown period (with a 75% reduction in the usage rate during lockdown). The psychological mechanisms of changes in food shopping behavior revealed that the context (e.g., community facilities) and the perceived risk of COVID-19 were two significant factors impacting the four shopping choices investigated. Specifically, the context factors affected behavior directly for supermarkets and convenience stores and indirectly for e-commerce and wet markets. The findings are expected to help in guiding emergency responses during a future pandemic as well as the long-term construction of food supply facilities.     

Instructional Manipulation Checks: A longitudinal analysis with implications for MTurk

Instructional Manipulation Checks (IMCs) assess respondent behavior by, for example, asking participants not to answer a trick question. We find IMCs can be used to detect problematic response behavior in longitudinal surveys. This is important because a Latent Class Analysis based on IMC-failure in the two reported studies reveals that between 9% and 12% of respondents can be labelled Inattentive Stayers at the first survey-wave and between 13% and 17% at the third wave. The tendency of Inattentive Stayers to remain in the panel is particularly relevant for online panel services such as MTurk, with workers participating in many surveys over longer time-periods. We find IMC-failure to be mitigated by a warning to respondents that their attention will be checked early in the survey, but not by repeated exposure to IMCs, or a timer leaving questions on the screen longer. Respondent personality also plays a role in IMC-failure, which implies persistency of undesirable respondent behavior.     

Is DNA fingerprinting the gold standard for estimation of adoption and impacts of improved lentil varieties?

In the early 1980s, disease susceptibility in short-season lentil landraces began to limit productivity in areas where relay cropping took place in Bangladesh. Since then, several improved high-yielding lentil varieties, which are resistant to rust and blight and suitable in the relay cropping system, have been released jointly by national and international research centers. This study used three methods, namely a panel of experts, a survey of 1000 households where the respondents named the variety they used, and DNA fingerprinting of seed samples collected from all lentil plots cultivated by survey households to estimate adoption. Double hurdle and instrumental variables regression methods were applied to the household survey and DNA fingerprinting data to identify determinants of adoption and measure their impacts. Of particular interest was whether estimates of adoption, determinants of adoption and impacts varied by method of variety identification. Results showed that the expert panel overestimated the adoption of more recent varieties while about 89% of the farmer-reported varieties were accurate, as verified by DNA fingerprinting. DNA fingerprinting appears to have little advantage for estimating the level of adoption in this case, where few varieties of lentils are found, local variety names do not exist, and most seed is obtained through a formal system. However, even under these conditions, determinants of adoption vary by identification method, and use of farmer-reported information on the variety can lead to erroneous conclusions about determinants of adoption. Because recent breeding efforts have focused on taste and cooking considerations, yield impacts were not significantly different from zero.     

中国农村宅基地闲置程度及其成因研究

研究目的：基于全国典型村庄调研，分析不同地区农村宅基地闲置程度和成因，为农村宅基地集约利用和乡村振兴提供建议。研究方法：实地调研法、对比分析法。研究结果：（1）调研村庄宅基地闲置现象普遍，2018年闲置程度平均为10.7%。（2）各地村庄宅基地闲置程度差异明显。分区域看，东部村庄宅基地闲置程度最高，中部村庄最低；分城乡区位看，村庄离城市距离越远，宅基地闲置程度越高；分地形看，平原村庄宅基地闲置程度最高；分是否为贫困村庄看，村庄宅基地闲置程度随村庄贫困程度的加深而升高。（3）宅基地闲置是乡村人口结构变化与宅基地利用失衡的结果。长期外出务工、城镇有住房、“一户多宅”、宅基地损毁引起宅基地闲置的成因占比依次下降。（4）农村宅基地闲置受乡村地域内外宏微观因素综合影响，经济增长和城镇化引起的就业非农化、人口市民化是宅基地闲置的直接动因，现行城乡二元制度和宅基地管理制度是宅基地闲置的根本原因。研究结论：盘活利用农村闲置宅基地，需要因地制宜推动闲置宅基地整治利用、健全宅基地有偿使用和退出机制、创新城乡制度加快农业转移人口市民化。     

Exploring the nexus between bank market power and exports

Although the literature underlines the importance of finance in international trade, no prior study has examined the causal links between market power in banking and export performance. Using a world sample over the 1997-2010 period, and accounting for both observed and unobserved country heterogeneity, we find a positive effect of bank market power on exports, especially in high-income countries. We also document that this export-enhancing effect is more potent in informationally opaque markets. Our findings accord with information hypothesis which suggests that market power in banking induces stronger bank-firm relationships which can generate benefits for both borrowers and lenders. Policy interventions should, therefore, promote the supply of relationship lending as a means to mitigate informational asymmetries in the export market.     

Economic forecasting with evolved confidence indicators

We present a machine-learning method for sentiment indicators construction that allows an automated variable selection procedure. By means of genetic programming, we generate country-specific business and consumer confidence indicators for thirteen European economies. The algorithm finds non-linear combinations of qualitative survey expectations that yield estimates of the expected rate of economic growth. Firms’ production expectations and consumers’ expectations to spend on home improvements are the most frequently selected variables – both lagged and contemporaneous. To assess the performance of the proposed approach, we have designed an out-of-sample iterative predictive experiment. We found that forecasts generated with the evolved indicators outperform those obtained with time series models. These results show the potential of the methodology as a predictive tool. Furthermore, the proposed indicators are easy to implement and help to monitor the evolution of the economy, both from demand and supply sides.     

Strategic Flexibility in New High‐Technology Ventures

Strategic flexibility is a vital capability for new ventures to update their strategies in a timely manner. However, the role of external knowledge sources in new ventures’ endeavours to develop strategic flexibility are unclear. Drawing on the knowledge‐based and relational views, we explore the effect of two sources of external knowledge: new product development (NPD) alliances, representing tightly coupled sources, and loosely coupled sources such as industry associations. Our field study of 148 high‐tech ventures found that the extent to which firms utilize knowledge from NPD alliances has a curvilinear relationship with strategic flexibility, whereas the extent to which firms utilize loosely coupled sources has a positive linear relationship with strategic flexibility. We also found that in new ventures, decentralization of decision‐making and institutional support enhance knowledge integration, positively moderating these relationships.     

New urban planning challenges under emerging autonomous mobility: evaluating backcasting scenarios and policies through an expert survey

The future implementation of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) in cities can have significant impacts, both positive and negative, on their sustainability. The objective of this research is to investigate those impacts and evaluate which policies could be most effective in achieving the desired city scenario through a backcasting planning methodology. To this end, a survey among experts was carried out in which they expressed their opinions on the potential consequences of AVs in cities and on the effectiveness of various policy packages focused on achieving a more sustainable mobility and land use planning. The results obtained show that the experts consulted were sceptical about the positive impacts of AVs, arguing that they could induce an increase in car trips and urban sprawl. The policies that could be most effective in mitigating these effects, leading to a city more aligned with the planned objectives would be: to strengthen active (foot, bicycle) and public transport modes, to restrict access of motorised modes to central urban areas and to use freed spaces for alternative modes of transport, green areas and public facilities. A cluster analysis also showed that most of the experts consulted considered that the policy packages presented could be effective or very effective in reaching the most desirable scenario. Therefore, it is important that the implementation of AVs does not subordinate to, but enhances, the sustainable mobility and land use policies already being developed in many urban areas.     

Comparative performances of measures of consumer and economic sentiment in forecasting consumption: a multi-country analysis

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to compare the capabilities of assorted measures of consumer and economic sentiment in predicting the growth of household expenditure. An analysis of quarterly data on five European countries shows that for none of these can the model which incorporates the EU’s headline consumer confidence indicator be deemed to be significantly inferior to any of its seven rivals. However, the rankings of the sentiment variables are seen to be influenced by: the proportion of total spending by households that is devoted to durable goods; and the nature of the behaviour of consumption over the forecast interval.     

A Different Perspective on the Evolution of UK Income Inequality

This paper scrutinizes the conventional wisdom about trends in UK income inequality and also places contemporary inequality in a much longer historical perspective. We combine household survey and income tax data to provide better coverage of all income ranges from the bottom to the very top (and make our estimates available to other researchers). We make a case for studying distributions of income between tax units (i.e. not assuming the full income sharing that goes with the use of the household as the unit of analysis) for reasons of principle as well as data harmonization. We present evidence that income inequality in the UK is as least as high today as it was just before the start of World War 2.