Drinking cheaply: the demand for basic wine in Italy

The wine market has evolved dramatically over the last three decades. The premium wine segment has expanded significantly to the detriment of basic wines. Nevertheless, in traditional wine producing and consuming countries, inexpensive wines still account for a large market share, both in volume and value. Marketing strategies for such wines are changing in an attempt to tap this increasingly crowded market segment. Despite its importance, the basic wine segment has not been studied in‐depth and is often assumed to have no product differentiation. This paper tried to ascertain the existence of a possible degree of heterogeneity within nonpremium wines and to measure, by means of elasticity computation, the relationships among categories of wines aggregated with criteria that go beyond price. A demand system (censored QUAIDS) was estimated, using a statistically representative panel of 6,773 Italian households, to see to what extent, if any, substitution occurs in home consumption of basic wines, which is the main channel of distribution of inexpensive wines in Italy. Although price is an important lever in supply policies, our results also suggest the importance of packaging, such as carton as an alternative to glass.     

A Comparison between Formal and Informal Mutual‐credit Arrangements

We analyze under what conditions a group of potential entrepreneurs prefer to form a Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA), or a mutual‐guarantee association, which we interpret in a rotating scheme and call Rotating Savings and Collateral Association (ROSCoA). We argue that: (1) ROSCAs (ROSCoAs) are likely to be more developed in countries with high (low) bank concentration; (2) the individual flow of savings required to participate in a ROSCoA is generally lower than that needed in a ROSCA; (3) under the assumption that members share their project income at the end of each period, ROSCAs and ROsCoAs are sustainable even without the use of sanctioning mechanisms.     

Driving Smartization Through Intelligent Transport

Smart cities initiatives are developing all over the world, due to their support in favouring a better provision of services, in connection with the aim of achieving efficiency in cities management. More and more big corporations are interested in this topic to develop their businesses, as several issues are linked to these projects, like environment, water management, energy policies, education, culture, and so on. In literature these issues, known as drivers, were also related to sustainability aims which could be reached through the accomplishment of better performances within environment, economy, and society. This study synthesizes all the different drivers identified by scholars and industry players in a model, in order to use it as a framework to depict the linkages among the various smart cities projects. Since transport resulted as one of the most considered drivers in the analyzed contributions, the research questions were delineated to describe its role in the different phases of smart initiatives, and to understand if it could encourage and enable the other drivers＇ development. The multiple case study was chosen as the fittest methodological approach and it was conducted with the selection of three smart cities, one for each of the most cited platform models developed by industry players, which had started transport initiatives at least three years ago： Singapore （IBM）, Amsterdam （Accenture）, and San Francisco （Microsoft）. The analysis of the official documents set up by city departments and by the industry players showed transport as a driving force in smart cities projects which conveys a smart approach to different domains, especially energy savings, environment, and safety. The results also showed smart mobility as a pivot in stimulating investments and citizens＇ participation on different city drivers, especially as it concerns environment and services to both citizens and businesses. Smart transport initiatives, hardware and software infrastructures, technological devices, and     

Impulse versus opportunistic purchasing during a grocery shopping experience

The current study introduces a conceptual distinction between two types of unplanned purchases—impulse purchases (i.e., spontaneous decisions triggered affectively) versus opportunistic purchases (i.e., rational decisions elicited by stimulus exposure)—grounded in separate dynamics of the cognitive processes unfolding during the course of a shopping trip. In a temporal analysis of shopping behavior within a simulated grocery-shopping experience, we found that participants increased their impulse buying but decreased their opportunistic buying, as a function of the number of basket items chosen previously. Similarly, impulse purchases increased in the final stages of the trip, particularly in shoppers without the aid of a shopping list, whereas opportunistic purchases decreased. Ours is thus the first study to report time–course evidence of two types of unplanned purchases within the grocery-shopping experience.     

Pseudo conditional maximum likelihood estimation of the dynamic logit model for binary panel data

We show how the dynamic logit model for binary panel data may be approximated by a quadratic exponential model. Under the approximating model, simple sufficient statistics exist for the subject-specific parameters introduced to capture the unobserved heterogeneity between subjects. The latter must be distinguished from the state dependence which is accounted for by including the lagged response variable among the regressors. By conditioning on the sufficient statistics, we derive a pseudo conditional likelihood estimator of the structural parameters of the dynamic logit model, which is simple to compute. Asymptotic properties of this estimator are studied in detail. Simulation results show that the estimator is competitive in terms of efficiency with estimators recently proposed in the econometric literature.     

Designing feasible and effective health plan payments in countries with data availability constraints

Risk equalization schemes, which transfer money to/from insurers that have above/below average risks, are a fundamental tool in regulated health insurance markets in many countries. Risk sharing (the transfer of some responsibility for costs from a plan to the regulator or the overall insurance market), are an additional method of insulating insurers who attract higher-than-average risks. This paper proposes, implements and quantifies incorporating risk sharing within a risk equalization scheme that can be applied in a data-poor context. Using Chile's private health insurance market as case study, we show that modest amount of risk sharing greatly improves fit even in simple demographic-based risk equalization. Expanding the model's formula to include morbidity-based adjustors and risk sharing redirects compensations at insurer level and reduces opportunity to engage in profitable risk selection at the group level. Our emphasis on feasibility may make alternatives proposed attractive to countries facing data-availability constraints.     

When income differences hurt or excite: The nonlinear effect of regional inequality on subjective wellbeing

Combining information from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions and the European Social Survey, we investigate the relationship between subjective well-being and income inequality using regional inequality indicators and individual data. We assume that inequality aversion and perception of social mobility affect the impact of regional inequality on subjective well-being in opposite directions. We find evidence of an inverse U-shaped effect of inequality, where inequality starts to have a positive effect on subjective well-being that becomes negative with a switch point before the average of the Gini index for the entire sample. The rationale for our nonlinear finding is that Hirschman's tunnel effect (and the positive effect of perceived social mobility) prevails for low levels of inequality, while inequality aversion and negative relative income effects are relatively stronger when inequality is higher. Robustness checks on different sample splits are consistent with the hypothesis of the two drivers.     

Cooperative movement and widespread prosperity across Italian regions

Our goal is to participate in the debate on regional well-being. To this end, we explore the relationship between prosperity and the cooperative movement at the regional level in Italy between 2010 and 2019. We summarize prosperity through an index originally proposed by Amartya Sen and we apply it to classify Italian regions. We then perform panel analyses showing that there is a positive and significant association between such an index and the cooperative presence. We detect that, and explain why, the cooperative movement contributes to the regional prosperity more through its employment than in terms of the added value it generates.