Designing business models in circular economy: A systematic literature review and research agenda

The concept of circular economy is increasingly receiving attention in different domains, including strategic management, operations management, and technology management. It requires companies to design their business model (i.e., the value network, the relationships with the supply chain partners, and the value propositions towards customers) around a new concept of sustainable development that reduces consumption of natural resources and preserves the environment. However, extant research falls short in terms of explaining how companies design their business model according to the circular economy principles. Starting from this premise, the present paper provides a systematic review of the literature on the design of business models in the context of circular economy, aiming to offer an overview of the state of research and outline a promising research agenda.     

PFIs involving multiple public partners: a case study from the Italian healthcare sector

The financial crisis experienced by many countries since 2008 has given new importance to private finance initiatives (PFIs) for providing public services. This paper analyses the relationships between multiple public and private sector actors participating in a PFI in the healthcare sector in order to better understand the motives and behaviour of public and private sector partners. High levels of trust and the active participation of a regulatory body were found to be significant factors in terms of creating a partnership that benefits all sides.     

MONETARY AND FISCAL POLICIES INTERACTION IN MONETARY UNIONS

In this paper, the literature on the interaction between monetary and fiscal policies in a monetary union is surveyed. By adopting the concept of symbiosis as a starting point, the paper highlights the importance of uncertainty, policy makers' preferences and targets. Then, the role of commitment to policy rules and coordination is addressed. The analysis also focuses on the importance of the data considered for the generation of the policy mix. As a final step, the paper discusses the main results in the literature on public debt management in a monetary union. All the reported theoretical results are then adopted to retrieve policy and institutional implications for the European Monetary Union.     

Thoughts,attitudes and profile of Brazilian consumers regarding food irradiation

This study aimed to examine the neophobia, knowledge, thoughts, and opinions related to food irradiation among consumers living in a small city in Brazil through the application of a behavioral and sociodemographic questionnaire. It was found that the 271 respondents had little knowledge about the process of food irradiation and had low intent to purchase irradiated food; several consumers associated irradiated food with radioactivity and cancer. Individuals with better knowledge about irradiation and those who are young, single, did not live with children, and had higher levels of education and higher monthly family incomes were more likely to buy irradiated foods than others. These results describe the profile of potential consumers of irradiated foods and the knowledge, thoughts and opinions of the residents of a small city relative to food irradiation. This data could assist industries that irradiate foods to adopt strategies that ensure greater acceptance of their products.     

Making Information on CSR Scores Salient: A Randomized Field Experiment

We locate a giant ‘school report‐like’ scorecard poster with domain‐specific social and environmental responsibility scores of the ten leading world food companies, measured by the Oxfam ‘Behind the Brands’ world campaign, at the entrance of selected supermarkets. We test the impact of these scores on consumers’ choices by means of a randomized field experiment. Our findings show that the Oxfam ranking matters since the treatment has a positive and significant effect on the market share of the companies with the highest scores and a negative and significant effect on the companies placed at the lowest ranks. Invisibility matters too, with the largest non‐ranked companies selling in the store experiencing a slight fall in their market shares.     

Expectations and industry location: a discrete time dynamical analysis

The new economic geography (NEG) aims to explain long-term patterns in the spatial allocation of industrial activities. It stresses that endogenous economic processes may enlarge small historic differences leading to quite different regional patterns—history matters for the long-term geographical distribution of economic activities. A pivotal element is that productive factors move to another region whenever the anticipated remuneration is higher in that region. Given the long-term nature of NEG analyses and the crucial role of expectations, it is astonishing that most of the existing models assume only naïve or myopic expectations. However, a recent stream of the literature in behavioral and experimental economics shows that agents often use expectational heuristics, such as trend extrapolating and trend reverting rules. We introduce such expectations formation hypotheses into a NEG model formulated in discrete time. This modification leads to a system of two nonlinear difference equations (corresponding, in the language of dynamical systems theory, to a 2-dimensional piecewise smooth map) and thus enriches the possible dynamic patterns: with trend extrapolating (reverting) the symmetric equilibrium is less (more) stable; and it may lose stability only via a flip bifurcation (or also via a Neimark–Sacker bifurcation) giving rise to a period-doubling cascade (or also to quasi-periodic orbits). In both cases, complex behavior is possible; multistability, that is, the coexistence of locally stable equilibria, is pervasive; and border-collision bifurcations are also allowed. In this sense, our analysis corroborates some of the basic insights of the NEG.     

Assessing market power in the U.S. commercial banking industry under deregulation

This study attempts to investigate market power in the U.S. commercial banking industry since the U.S. government began to deregulate the banking sector in the early 1990s using the static Bresnahan–Lau model (SBLM) and dynamic Bresnahan–Lau model with error corrections (DBLEC). In particular, panel unit root and panel cointegration techniques are utilized to examine the dynamic model. The empirical results of the SBLM show that the banking industry is highly competitive. The empirical results of DBLEC also suggest that the commercial banking industry is close to being perfectly competitive in the short run. By contrast, the adjustment speeds of the supply and demand sides towards the long-run equilibrium are quite slow in that market, which implies that the U.S. commercial banks enjoy a certain degree of long-run market power.     

THE INFLUENCE OF DIFFERENT FORMS OF GOVERNMENT SPENDING ON DISTRIBUTION AND GROWTH

This paper deals with the influence of different types of government expenditure on growth in a post‐Keynesian framework. The analysis considers a government sector with a balanced budget and an autonomous and non‐linear investment function, interpreted along a Kaleckian and a Classical‐Harrodian line. It shows under which conditions different types of government expenditure are beneficial or detrimental for economic growth, comparing some results with those reached by Barro in his 1990 Journal of Political Economy article, and points out the emergence of phenomena like multiple equilibria, hysteresis and low growth traps.