What Initiatives Are British Food Retailers Taking to Improve Children’s Health and Nutrition?

Along with food manufacturers, retailers contribute directly to the national diet. While efforts to reformulate private-label products have been assessed, little research considers other voluntary initiatives to impact public health. We explore efforts targeting children’s health and nutrition. Making use of the corporate social responsibility reports of the seven leading retailers from 2006 to 2011, we examine the types of actions, by which retail chains and when. Before 2008, most retailers reported on initiatives promoting children’s nutrition education and physical activity in schools. Since 2009, references to such programs have decreased, with a shift toward child wellness. We find that retailers differ in approaches and commitment. Those with larger market shares mention initiatives more frequently. Most activities are related to nutrition education, developing cooking skills, and promotion of physical activity and not product reformulation. Our research suggests these efforts are not coordinated, might be misplaced, and do not persist over time.     

Innovation Economy,Productive Public Expenditure and Economic Growth

Multidisciplinary innovation is the main engine of growth for an increasing number of economies. Innovation requires the participation of and interaction between all economic agents. It also requires public spending on education, research and infrastructures. Our main goal is to emphasize the government's role in a growing innovation economy. Developing a non‐scale, idea‐based, one‐sector growth model with complementarities and productive public expenditure, we analyse theoretically the growth effects of an increase in productive public expenditure, which we find positive in the short, medium and long run.     

ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF DISTRIBUTIVE POLICIES ON THE BRAZILIAN ECONOMY USING AN SCGE MODEL

This study investigates the impact of macroeconomic policies on the Brazilian economy. We present a two-sector, open-economy, Structuralist Computable General Equilibrium model that distinguishes among three economic classes and assumes no financial sector. The Social Accounting Matrix for Brazil in 2006 serves as a benchmark for our model. We compare the medium-run effects of five experiments: an income transfer towards formal workers, a transfer to informal labour, an investment shock, an exchange rate depreciation, and a policy mix that combines (exchange rate) depreciation with income transfer towards modern (sector) workers. The policy measures reinforce each other in terms of their potential to enhance growth. Our findings underscore the importance of redistributive policies to foster economic expansion.     

The "New" Stability and Growth Pact: More Flexible,Less Stupid?

The doubts and criticisms with regard to the fiscal discipline imposed by the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) have been many and varied, and the SGP was revised as a result. The following paper evaluates the changes contained in the "new" SGP by considering the properties for ideal fiscal rules put forward by Kopits and Symansky. The analysis points towards a clear increase in flexibility together with the probable emergence of new enforcement problems. In this context, the need for new improvements within the European framework for the definition and implementation of national fiscal policies is discussed.     

Managers and Wage Policies

Do individual top managers matter for wages and wage policies? Are there general differences in “style” among managers with respect to worker compensation? To shed light on these questions, we exploit a large panel dataset from Portugal that allows us to match workers, firms, and managers, and follow the movements of the latter across different firms over time. While accounting for the effect of worker and firm heterogeneity, we estimate the role of top manager fixed effects in determining wages and wage policies. The estimates suggest that (i) top managers have a significant influence on wages and wage policies; (ii) there exists different managerial “styles”; and (iii) managers’ (observable) attributes matter for worker compensation.     

Simultaneous Pooled Auctions

Suppose a seller wants to sell k similar or identical objects and there are n > k potential buyers. Suppose that each buyer wants only one object. In this case, we suggest the use of a simultaneous auction that would work as follows. Players are asked to submit sealed bids for one object. The individual with the highest bid chooses an object first; the individual with the second-highest bid chooses the next object; and this process continues until the individual with the kth highest bid receives the last object. Each individual pays the equivalent to his or her bid. When objects are identical, we show that the proposed auction generates the same revenue as a first-price sealed-bid sequential auction. When objects are perfectly correlated, there is no known solution for sequential auctions, whereas we can characterize bidding strategies in the proposed auction. Moreover, the proposed auction is optimal (given an appropriately chosen reserve price), and it may be easier and cheaper to run than a sequential auction.     

Run theorems for low returns and large banks

In this paper, we revisit the issue of bank fragility in the Diamond and Dybvig (J Polit Econ 91:401–419, 1983) model with sequential service and finite traders. We provide a precise condition under which banks are susceptible to a run when the return on investment is low, and we show that sufficiently large banks are always susceptible to a run. One interpretation of the condition is that exposure to runs occurs when desire for consumption smoothing or predictability of preference profiles are relatively high.     

Quasiconcavity and the kernel of a separable utility

Summary. In this paper I prove that a quasiconcave separable utility function defined on an atomless space is concave. Received: August 11, 1997; revised version: October 2, 1997     

First-price auction symmetric equilibria with a general distribution

In this paper I obtain the mixed strategy symmetric equilibria of the independent private values, first-price auction for any distribution of valuations. The equilibrium strategy is a pure strategy at the continuity points of the distribution and bids a mixed strategy at the discontinuity points of the distribution.