Behind the ‘creative destruction’ of human diets: An analysis of the structure and market dynamics of the ultra-processed food manufacturing industry and implications for public health

A global transition towards diets increasingly dominated by ultra-processed foods (UPFs) has occurred in recent decades to the detriment of public health and the environment. This study aimed to examine long-term trends in the structure and market dynamics of the global UPF manufacturing industry as part of broader efforts to understand the drivers of this transition. Using diverse methods, metrics and data sources, we examined several dimensions (e.g., industry concentration and profitability) according to an adapted structure–conduct–performance model. We found that the global UPF manufacturing industry has evolved to become a major component of global food systems, with its longstanding dominant corporations becoming some of the system's largest accumulators of profit and distributors of capital. It follows that reversing the global UPF dietary transition will require structural and regulatory changes to ensure that population diets, and food systems more broadly, are not subordinated to the interests of powerful for-profit business corporations.     

Impact investing in biodiversity conservation with bonds: An analysis of financial and environmental risk

Impact investments have the dual goals of generating profit and environmental and/or social impact from the same project or enterprise. This article examines recent impact investments in biodiversity conservation—specifically, debt finance in the form of conventional bonds and impact bonds. The proceeds of these bonds finance projects aiming to enhance forest management, sustainable agriculture, endangered species protection, ecosystem service provision, and nature-based solutions to climate change such as REDD+. The article scrutinises whether these dual goals are achievable by evaluating the financial risks and impact risks within each bond's theory of change. Risks stem from projects with vague cashflow forecasts, project sites with low or ambiguous threat statuses, and simplified impact metrics that may measure activities or outputs—rather than impact. Risk mitigation strategies involve using baselines and counterfactuals to establish additionality, and guarantors to protect investors if revenues are insufficient. Implications for biodiversity management and for-profit conservation are discussed.     

The impact of COVID-19 on consumer evaluation of authentic advertising messages

This study investigates the relationship between the COVID-19 threat and consumer evaluation of a product with authenticity appeals in advertisements. We propose that threatening situations like COVID-19 motivate consumers to lower their uncertainty and increase their preference for products with authentic advertising messages. Because individuals react differently to threatening environments according to their early-life experiences, commonly reflected in childhood socioeconomic status, we examined whether childhood socioeconomic status moderates the relationship between threat and consumer evaluation of authenticity in advertisements. First, secondary data from Google Trends provided empirical support for our predictions. In additional experimental studies, participants evaluated different target products in four studies that either manipulated (Studies 2 and 3) or measured (Studies 4 and 5) COVID-19 threat. Our results provide converging evidence that consumers positively evaluate products with authentic advertising messages under the COVID-19 threat. Consumers' motivation to lower their uncertainty underlies the effect of COVID-19 threat on their evaluation of authentic messages (Study 3). This attempt to reduce uncertainty is more likely to occur for consumers with relatively higher childhood socioeconomic status (Studies 4 and 5). These findings suggest that using authenticity appeals during a pandemic could effectively reduce consumers' perceived uncertainty and generate positive consumer evaluations.     

The impact of social influence in Australian real estate: market forecasting with a spatial agent-based model

Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination - Housing markets are inherently spatial, yet many existing models fail to capture this spatial dimension. Here, we introduce a new graph-based...     

Dissimilarity effects on house prices: what is the value of similar neighbours?

Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination - Residential choice does not only depend on properties of the dwelling, neighbourhood amenities and affordability, but is also affected by the...     

Ease of doing business and investment among West African countries

This study assessed the link between ease of doing business (EBD) and investment among 11 selected countries in West Africa covering 2006–2020. The study used the fixed-effects estimator, the random-effects estimator, the augmented mean-group method, and the Half-Panel Jackknife Wald-type test. The study found a bidirectional relationship between the EBD and foreign direct investment (FDI) and a unidirectional relationship running from EBD to domestic investment. The findings further revealed that the EBD and national income have a strong influence in determining the level of domestic investment and FDI inflows, and that some indicators of EBD, such as the procedure for starting a business, access to credit facilities, tax, and security threats, discourage domestic investment and FDI inflows, in contrast to the influence of obtaining electricity and national income on investment. The study suggests that West African governments reduce taxes, ease the procedures and costs of starting a business and dealing with construction permits, and increase the availability of credit facilities at lower interest rates to promote investment in the region.     

Does mutual fund ownership reduce stock price clustering? Evidence from active and index funds

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - The literature is rich with examples of price clustering in financial markets. This study focuses on the relation between mutual fund ownership (both...     

US state-level economic freedom during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic led to extensive new government regulations and lockdown policies that significantly reduced economic freedom across US states. Many of these new pandemic-related regulatory restrictions on economic freedom varied significantly from state to state but are largely missed by the existing Economic Freedom of North America Report (EFNA). This paper adjusts the Our World in Data COVID-19 Stringency Index into a state-level measure of lockdown regulatory freedom and then merges it into the EFNA index to better measure relative economic freedom across US states in 2020. We find significant differences in the relative ranking of economic freedom between states once we adjust for lockdown regulatory restrictions.     

Feuding,arbitration, and the emergence of an independent judiciary

Constitutional Political Economy - Anthropologists, historians, and political economists suggest that private violence—feuding—provides order and enforces agreements in the absence of a...     

The electric vehicle revolution: Critical material supply chains,trade and development

The emergence of a mass market for electric vehicles (EVs) offers development opportunities for countries that have abundant resources of cobalt, nickel, lithium, copper, aluminium and manganese. Not surprisingly, developing countries have proposed ambitious plans to expand production of these raw materials. However, an observation from the resource curse literature is that strong institutions are required if they are to mitigate the risk of poorly directed, often excessively procyclical, investment, not least because of the complexity, opacity and price volatility of many raw materials utilised by global EV value chains. This paper examines the outlook for EV demand and associated raw material usage paying attention to the drivers and sensitivities required to assess and track future market transformations. These end use shifts are then placed in the context of the broader supply chain adjustments and trends shaping the demand. For resource exporters, adapting to structural change will require fiscal, regulatory, environmental and institution reforms designed to capture shifting patterns of resource wealth in a way which takes appropriate account of comparative advantages in specific value chains and mitigates adverse environmental and social consequences from their extraction and processing.