Consumers’ willingness to pay for eco-friendly apples under different labels: Evidences from a lab experiment

An experiment was conducted in France to evaluate the impact of health and environmental information on consumers’ choices between conventional and organic apples. Results show that additional and precise messages about both pesticides use and pesticides residues significantly impact consumers’ choices between both products. The experiment also studied the effect of a new label signaling apples that only use few pesticides compared to conventional apples. With elicited willingness-to-pay, we show that the introduction of this new label increases the average participants’ surplus whatever the information context for participants, because of a higher quality compared to conventional apples and a lower price compared to organic products. In order to complement this label, a minimum-quality standard imposing the use of few pesticides is socially optimal when initial participants’ knowledge is limited.     

Product quality and firm heterogeneity in international trade

This paper quantifies the separate contributions of product quality and technical efficiency in explaining variation in export outcomes across US manufacturing plants. Unlike previous studies that rely on unit values, I estimate idiosyncratic demand from price and quantity information. I find substantial across‐plant heterogeneity in demand, and consistent with the quality interpretation, demand is positively correlated with advertising expenditures, wage rates and material costs. I use this variation to explain across‐plant heterogeneity in export outcomes. The results show that, in addition to productivity, idiosyncratic demand is an important determinant of selection into exporting and the levels of foreign sales.     

How does Internationalisation affect the productivity of R&D activities in large innovative firms? A conditional nonparametric investigation

Quality & Quantity - This work explores the relationship between multinational R&D and innovation productivity among top corporate knowledge and R&D producers by adopting a...     

A dynamic theory of the declining aggregated labor income share: Intangible capital vs. tangible capital

Reports of the literature documenting the declining labor share of income have increased greatly in the past few years, which is opposed to one of the famous “Kaldor's stylized facts” of growth. The declining labor income share has been observed since the 1980s in a number of countries, and especially in the United States. Recent studies have revealed the following five major driving forces of the declining labor share: (i) supercycles and boom-busts, (ii) rising and faster depreciation, (iii) superstar effects and consolidation, (iv) capital substitution and automation, and (v) globalization and labor bargaining power. We set up a two-sector optimal growth model with the R&D intermediate sectors producing intangible capital. By integrating driving factors (ii) through (iv) above into the model, we demonstrate the long-run decline of the aggregated labor income share.     

On the reliability of unitizing textual continua: Further developments

This paper builds on an agreement coefficient proposed by Krippendorff (Content analysis: an introduction to its methodology, 2013) for measuring the reliability of unitizing and coding continuous phenomena, for example, of texts, videos, or sound recordings. It serves three purposes: It modifies Krippendorff’s definition which turned out to behave not as expected when applied to more than two observers, coders, or annotators. It extends this reliability measure to a family of four coefficients able to assess the reliabilities of diverse properties of unitized continua. It adds a way to obtain the confidence intervals of these coefficients as well as the probability of failing to reach targeted reliability levels. And it describes and provides access to free software that calculates all values of this family of reliability coefficients.     

Comovements in the real activity of developed and emerging economies: A test of global versus specific international factors

Although globalization has shaped the world economy in recent decades, emerging economies have experienced impressive growth compared to developed economies, suggesting specific comovements within developed and emerging business cycles. Using observed developed and emerging real economy activity variables, we investigate whether the latter assertion can be supported by observed data. Based on a two-level factor model, we assume these activity variables can be decomposed into global components, emerging or developed common components, and idiosyncratic national shocks. We propose a statistical test for the null hypothesis of a one-level specification, where it is irrelevant to distinguish between emerging and developed latent factors against the two-level alternative. This paper provides a theoretical justification and Monte Carlo simulations that document the testing procedure. An application of the test to various data sets of developed and emerging countries leads to strong statistical evidence of specific comovements within these two groups.     

Coordination Costs and the Geography of Production

In a model à la Venables of 1996 Venables, A. J. (1996) Equilibrium locations of vertically linked industries, International Economic review, 37, 341–359. doi: 10.2307/2527327[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], we distinguish two kinds of intermediate goods: complex goods that entail endogenous coordination costs, and simple goods that do not. Coordination costs depend on geographical distance and the number of intermediate goods used in the production process. In the final stage of integration, there are two possible spatial configurations: (1) a symmetric configuration and (2) a partial core–periphery equilibrium, comprised of a core region that produces the final and complex intermediate goods, and a periphery that produces simple intermediate goods. We discuss some policy implications of this multiple-equilibria outcome.

Les coûts de coordination et la géographie de la production     

Bargaining over an uncertain outcome:¶the role of beliefs

We study the Nash bargaining solution of a problem in which two agents bargain over an uncertain outcome. Under the assumptions of risk neutrality and of constant absolute risk aversion, we study the way that the solution varies, ex ante, when we vary the beliefs of one agent. Changing an agent's beliefs in a way that makes them “more distant” from the other agent's beliefs makes the second agent better off. Received: 10 May 2001 / Accepted: 22 August 2001     

Are Choice Rationality and Social Consistency Two Sides of a Same Coin?

This paper aims at proving that a society cannot be consistent if it is constituted of decision-makers who are not rational. For that purpose, we propose to justify social interactions by means of individual preferences. More precisely, we establish that individual choice rationality is logically equivalent, i.e. is a necessary and sufficient condition, to social consistency—when individual rationality means that preferences are completely ordered (as in standard microeconomics) and social consistency that there is a one-to-one mapping from the list of actual communities to the underlying particular interaction (unique, reflexive and symmetric) between all individuals of the society.     

The Influence of Stock Market Listing on Human Resource Management: Evidence for France and Britain

We use data from the Relations Professionnelles et Négociations d'Entreprise survey of 2004 and the Workplace Employment Relations Survey of 2004 to analyse how far approaches to human resource management differ according to whether an establishment is part of a company with a stock exchange listing. In both countries we find that listing is positively associated with teamworking and performance‐related pay, while in France, but not in Britain, it is also linked to worker autonomy and training. Our findings are inconsistent with the claim that shareholder pressure operates as a constraint on the adoption of high‐performance workplace practices. The pattern is similar in the two countries, but with a slightly stronger tendency for listing to be associated with high‐performance workplace practices in France.