A Heckman Sample Selection Approach to the Demand for Organic Food Products: An Exploratory Study Using Penang Data

Heckman's sample selection analysis is used on survey data in Penang, Malaysia, to examine sociodemographical and attitudinal factors affecting purchase decisions and expenditures on organic food products (OFP). Results of the marginal effects indicate that Chinese, affluent, and those who do not consider price to be a major factor have higher probabilities to spend and expend more on OFP. While Malays, females, and those with concerns about chemical additives and who consume monthly health supplements are likelier purchasers, those who perceive a lack of availability in the market are less prone to procure OFP. Last, individuals between 31–56 years and with more children spend in larger amounts compared to others.     

A nonparametric analysis of multi-product oligopolies

We develop revealed preference tests for models of multi-product oligopoly, building on the work in Carvajal et al. (Econometrica 81(6):2351–2379, 2013). We analyze a Cournot model with multiple goods and show that it has testable restrictions when at least one good is produced by two or more firms. We also develop a revealed preference test for Bertrand oligopoly in a setting where each firm produces a single differentiated good, and these goods are potentially substitutes for each other. Our tests require qualitative assumptions on the shape of the demand curves and (in the Bertrand case) their evolution across observations, but they do not rely on the estimation of market demand.     

Can Japan or China replace the US as the monetary anchor for Hong Kong and Macau?

This contribution attempts to examine the relative importance of the US, Japan and China to Hong Kong and Macau, two effective dollar-based currency boards today, by evaluating the economic potentiality of Japan or China as an alternative monetary anchor country against the US. The assessment is made according to the criteria prescribed by the optimum currency areas (OCA) theory. In addition to that, a subsidiary analysis is done to evaluate in general the suitability of their fixed exchange rate regimes, regardless of the anchor country. Amidst the existing dollar linked arrangement and the rising dominance of China, significant evidence suggests that Japan, despite its lacklustre domestic conditions, might be at least as good a monetary anchor as the US for Hong Kong. In the meantime, China seems to be a more promising monetary anchor alternative for Macau. The features of Hong Kong and Macau also appear to broadly and endogenously support their fixed exchange rates, but not all the features of Macau, a HK-dollar-based currency board, are consistently symmetrical with those of Hong Kong.     

Clustering eurozone cycles

Firstly, the study draws out symmetrical subsets of 27 member countries of the European Union (EU27) countries according to their extents of business cycle symmetry with the whole of EA12, quantified by correlations of cycles between the countries’ GDP components and the EA12s GDP. The objective is to evaluate the obtained country groupings against the EA12 countries, the initial members of the euro club. This exercise is implemented using hierarchical cluster analysis for pre- and post-euro periods. As a robustness check, a principal component analysis is applied. Secondly, the analysis deploys a discriminant technique on the cluster analysis solutions to identify the GDP component whose cycle synchronicity contributes most to separation of the countries. In a nutshell, the findings suggest a significant rise in fragmentation within EU27 and within EA12 after euroization and that cycle synchronization involving the GDP component of private investment as a more important determinant to country classifications.     

The existence of equilibrium when excess demand obeys the weak axiom

This paper gives a non-fixed point theoretic proof of equilibrium existence when the excess demand function of an exchange economy obeys the weak axiom of revealed preference.     

A contribution to duality theory,applied to the measurement of risk aversion

This paper determines the precise connection between the curvature properties of an objective function and the ray-curvature properties of its dual. When the objective function is interpreted as a Bernoulli or cardinal utility function, our results characterize the relationship between an agent’s attitude towards income risks and her attitude towards risks in the underlying consumption space. We obtain these results by developing and applying a number of representation theorems for concave functions.The work of Juan E. Martínez-Legaz has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology and the FEDER, project BEC2002-00642, and by the Departament d’Universitats, Recerca i Societat de la Informació, Direcció General de Recerca de la Generalitat de Catalunya, project 2001SGR-00162. He also thanks the Barcelona Economics Program of CREA for its support. John Quah would like to acknowledge with gratitude the financial support of the ESRC (grant number R000271171). He would also like to thank the Department of Economics at UC Berkeley, whose hospitality he enjoyed while completing this project. Both authors would like to thank Simon Cowan for pointing the way to some important references. They are also very grateful to the referee whose insightful suggestions led to a much improved paper     

Pursuing Economic Growth in Asia: The Environmental Challenge

This paper identifies and discusses the five main areas of environmental management public policy that pose serious challenges to Asian governments. The first is the emerging issue of siting environmentally unfriendly facilities that may be necessary for growth, but with the social and environmental costs borne primarily by local host residents and neighbourhood municipalities, more commonly known as the not‐in‐my‐backyard syndrome. The second issue is the critical need for pricing of non‐market environmental goods. Third is the issue of waste generation. The fourth challenge is that of transboundary pollution, which has become increasingly important with regard to its effects on health and foreign relations. Lastly, the paper discusses global warming and climate change. Discussions on cost–benefit analysis and the more novel method of establishing damage schedules are also presented. This is particularly relevant to fundamental differences between developed and less developed countries.     

A class of spatial econometric methods in the empirical analysis of clusters of firms in the space

In this paper we aim at identifying stylized facts in order to suggest adequate models for the co-agglomeration of industries in space. We describe a class of spatial statistical methods for the empirical analysis of spatial clusters. The main innovation of the paper consists in considering clustering for bivariate (rather than univariate) distributions. This allows uncovering co-agglomeration and repulsion phenomena between the different sectors. Furthermore we present empirical evidence on the pair-wise intra-sectoral spatial distribution of patents in Italy in 1990s. We identify some distinctive joint patterns of location between different sectors and we propose some possible economic interpretations. A previous version of this paper was presented at the Workshop on Spatial Econometrics and Statistics, held in Rome 25–27 May 2006. We wish to thank the participants for the useful comments received. The comments received by two anonymous referees are also gratefully acknowledged. They improved substantially the quality of our work.