Exploring costs and benefits of compliance with HACCP regulation in the European meat and dairy sectors

A Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) Program was introduced as a mandatory measure in the EU in the 1990s. Despite its impact on the food industry, only limited literature addresses the issue of cost and benefits of HACCP at the firm level in Europe. This paper illustrates the results of a pilot study on case studies in Italy, UK and The Netherlands, providing a first assessment of the order of magnitude of costs of compliance and a qualitative illustration of the main benefits perceived by producers.     

From the blogosphere into the parliament: The role of digital technologies in organizing social movements

In this paper, we present a process model exploring the roles played by digital technologies (DTs) in the organization of collective action (CA) of social movements (SMs) at different points in their lifecycles. The process model, which is based on an exploratory case study of the Italian Five Star Movement, relates the environmental conditions to the working logic, structure and use of DTs at three different stages of the SMs. We explain how these choices are adopted at each stage to address internal and environmental challenges and how they create further challenges to be addressed to pass to the next stage. We further explore the dynamics between the logic of connective and collective action and reflect on the growing need for structures and control. By so doing, our work addresses the need for a better understanding of the coevolution between DTs and organizational structures and of the ways in which DTs are used to mobilize people to sustain CA along the SM lifecycle.     

Option strategies: Good deals and margin calls

We provide evidence that trading frictions have an economically important impact on the execution and the profitability of option strategies that involve writing out-of-the-money put options. Margin requirements, in particular, limit the notional amount of capital that can be invested in the strategies and force investors to close down positions and realize losses. The economic effect of frictions is stronger when the investor seeks to write options more aggressively. Although margins are effective in reducing counterparty default risk, they also impose a friction that limits investors from supplying liquidity to the option market.     

Trust and creativity: understanding the role of trust in creativity-oriented joint developments

In this article we report on the design, prototyping and results of a research effort aimed at identifying whether and how trust affects the innovativeness of a partnership between two players. The methodology combined an experiment and two questionnaires. The research aimed to increase our understanding of trust and its impact on the innovative outcome of cooperation and to derive some guidance for economic actors, namely R&D managers and executives who intend to build innovation-oriented relationships with their business partners. Specifically, we investigated the effect of trust on partners' creativity and willingness to invest financially in a joint development. Our results show that more trustful partners invest higher amounts in the alliance, while there seems to be an optimum amount of mutual trust between partners who maximize their joint creativity and innovativeness; if the level of mutual trust is below or above this threshold, their joint creativity seems to increase less or even to decrease. Our findings suggest that joint development projects should always include explicit trust development activities at the beginning of the project, and that the amount of trust in the joint team should be monitored to avoid the negative consequences of excessive trust.     

Consistent estimation of a general nonparametric regression function in time series

We propose an estimator of the conditional distribution of X_t|X_t−1,X_t−2,…, and the corresponding regression function , where the conditioning set is of infinite order. We establish consistency of our estimator under stationarity and ergodicity conditions plus a mild smoothness condition.     

Food Scares and Trust: A European Study

The complex interactions between the determinants of food purchase under risk are explored using the SPARTA model, based on the theory of planned behaviour, and estimated through a combination of multivariate statistical techniques. The application investigates chicken consumption choices in two scenarios: (a) a ‘standard’ purchasing situation; and (b) following a hypothetical Salmonella scare. The data are from a nationally representative survey of 2,725 respondents from five European countries: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Results show that the effects and interactions of behavioural determinants vary significantly within Europe. Only in the case of a food scare do risk perceptions and trust come into play. The policy priority should be on building and maintaining trust in food and health authorities and research institutions, while food chain actors could mitigate the consequences of a food scare through public trust. No relationship is found between socio‐demographic variables and consumer trust in food safety information.     

Identifying the Independent Sources of Consumption Variation

By representing a system of budget shares as an approximate factor model we determine its rank, i.e. the number of common functional forms or factors, and we estimate a base of the factor space by means of approximate principal components. We assume that the extracted factors span the same space of basic Engel curves representing the fundamental forces driving consumers' behaviour. We identify these curves by imposing statistical independence and by studying their dependence on total expenditure using local linear regressions. We prove consistency of the estimates. Using data from the UK Family Expenditure Survey from 1977 to 2006, we find strong evidence of two common factors and mixed evidence of a third factor. These are identified as decreasing, increasing, and almost constant Engel curves. The household consumption behaviour is therefore driven by two factors respectively related to necessities (e.g. food), luxuries (e.g. vehicles), and in some cases by a third factor related to goods to which is allocated the same percentage of total budget both by rich and poor households (e.g. housing). Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Does total-factor productivity drive housing prices? A growth-accounting exercise for four countries

Housing prices diverge from construction prices after 1997 in four major countries. Besides, total-factor productivity (TFP) differences between construction and the general economy account for the evolution of construction prices in the US and Germany, but not in the UK and Spain.     

Causal Effect of Credit Guarantees for Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises: Evidence from Italy

We evaluate the effectiveness of a partial credit guarantee program, implemented in a large Italian region, that aimed to improve the access to credit of small and medium enterprises. Using unique microdata from a broad set of firms, we show that the policy increased the long-term loans for beneficiary firms, while the total volume of bank loans was unaffected. Furthermore, targeted firms benefited from a substantial decrease in interest rates. However, there is some evidence that firms are more likely to default as a consequence of the treatment. Conversely, the results do not point to any significant effect on investments.