Off-season tourists and the cultural offer of a mass-tourism destination: The case of Rimini

This paper assesses the potential implications on off-season tourism of enhancing the cultural offer of Rimini, a popular Italian seaside holiday destination hosting about 12 million overnight stays per year. Since more than 9 million of these stays are concentrated in the summer season, in the last 20 years. Rimini has been undergoing a policy of seasonality smoothing, which mainly pivots around business and cultural tourism. This assessment has been carried out through discrete choice experiments submitted to a sample of about 800 tourists who visited Rimini outside the summer months. Since tourism can be viewed as a composite good, which overall utility depends on how the component characteristics are arranged, the choice experiments allow to disentangle the importance and the willingness to pay of tourists for different attributes of the holiday. The choice model incorporates a number of possible changes to actual tourism features (which are also the subject of public debate), including them in hypothetical alternative “holiday packages”. The conditional logit analysis of the choice experiments can highlight any synergy or trade-off between cultural and business tourism. Results suggest that business and leisure tourists share many features related to the use of the territory, while there are important trade-offs between these two groups and cultural tourists. Since business tourists have a higher willingness to extend their stay, a softer budget, and their demand is also complementary to the demand of summer tourists (Brau, Scorcu, & Vici, 2009), from the destination point of view investing in this market segment would be the best option. Although a “second best”, however, cultural tourists share with the local population of Rimini many aspects of the demand of territory (Figini, Castellani, & Vici, 2009). Hence, cultural tourism can play a fundamental role in the intermediate season as a tool for smoothing seasonality, to diversify investments and to give value to the city’s cultural heritage.     

Unobserved firm heterogeneity and the size-exports nexus: Evidence from German panel data

This paper starts from the stylized fact that firm size and exporting tends to be positively related. Using large sets of establishment panel data for three different industries from official statistics, evidence is presented that the familiar picture of an export/sales ratio that increases (at a decreasing rate) with firm size vanishes if unobserved firm heterogeneity is controlled for in a fixed-effects fractional logit regression model. This finding is well in line with the fact that many small firms are “hidden export champions.” JEL no. F10, D21, L60     

Incorporating risk in a positive mathematical programming framework: a dual approach

In this study we develop a new methodological proposal to incorporate risk into a farm‐level positive mathematical programming (PMP) model. We estimate simultaneously the farm nonlinear cost function and a farmer‐specific coefficient of absolute risk aversion as well as the resource shadow prices. The model is applied to a sample of representative arable crop farms from the Emilia‐Romagna region in Italy. The estimation results confirm the calibration ability of the model and reveal the values of the individual risk aversion coefficients. We use the model to simulate different scenarios of crop price volatility, in order to explore the potential risk management role of an agri‐environmental scheme.     

WELFARE ENHANCING COORDINATION IN CONSUMER COOPERATIVES UNDER MIXED OLIGOPOLY

The recent globalization of world economies has led the retail markets of developed countries towards increasing levels of integration and strategic interdependence. A non negligible share of retail and food markets is currently served by co‐operative societies. Consistently with this trend, the consumer cooperatives have recently experienced increasing levels of integration. The main aim of this paper is to study the welfare effects of coordination among consumer cooperatives competing in quantities in a mixed oligopoly against profit‐maximizing firms. We show that, in absence of agency problems, under increasing or constant returns to scale a higher output coordination of the consumer cooperatives does not affect the total welfare as long as a nonnegative profit constraint holds in these firms. On the other hand, under decreasing returns to scale, the consumer cooperatives contribute more to social welfare when acting on behalf of all consumers. This is because, by coordinating consumers’ preferences, these firms can reduce their market output, thus helping the market to come closer to the first best. All together these results seem to provide an argument in favour of the recent process of integration involving consumer cooperatives in many developed countries.     

Is the use of bank debt as a governance mechanism conditioned by the financial system? The cases of Chile and Spain

We test whether the use of bank debt as a governance mechanism is conditioned by the financial system in which firms operate. Our results indicate that the legal and institutional environment determines the use of bank debt to finance growth opportunities. Firms use bank debt to finance their growth opportunities when the country's banking system contributes to solving agency and asymmetric information problems and avoiding information monopoly costs. The evolutionary process of the financial systems in each country means that market imperfections such as information asymmetry or agency costs can have a diverse influence on firms’ bank debt decisions.     

Consumer flexibility,data quality and location choice

We analyze firms’ location choices in a Hotelling model with two-dimensional consumer heterogeneity, along addresses and transport cost parameters (flexibility). Firms can price discriminate based on perfect data on consumer addresses and (possibly) imperfect data on consumer flexibility. We show that firms’ location choices depend on how strongly consumers differ in flexibility. Precisely, when consumers are relatively homogeneous, equilibrium locations are socially optimal regardless of the quality of customer flexibility data. However, when consumers are relatively differentiated, firms make socially optimal location choices only when customer flexibility data becomes perfect. These results are driven by the optimal strategy of a firm on its turf, monopolization or market-sharing, which in turn depends on consumer heterogeneity in flexibility. Our analysis is motivated by the availability of customer data, which allows firms to practice third-degree price discrimination based on both consumer characteristics relevant in spatial competition, addresses and transport cost parameters.     

Higher Tax for Top Earners

The literature can justify both increasing and decreasing marginal taxes (IMT & DMT) on top incomes under different welfare objectives and income distributions. Even when DMT are theoretically optimal, they are often politically infeasible. Then a flat tax seems to be a constrained optimal solution. We show however that, given any flat tax we can increase the total utility of a poor majority by raising the top income tax rate under a simple condition, which can be checked with empirical data. We further generalize our main results allowing different welfare weights, declining elasticity of labor supply and more tax bands.     

Smith and Rousseau on envy in commercial societies

Abstract

Several works emphasise the similarities between Rousseau and Smith's analysis of self-interest. We will show, along the lines of Le Jalle, that these similarities end on a divergent appreciation of the importance of envy in commercial societies for, contrary to Rousseau, Smith did not consider envy to be a major threat in commercial societies. Part 1 presents their quite similar definitions of envy based on three characteristics: envy comes from a disadvantageous comparison with others; it is painful and malevolent. Part 2, then, studies their moral psychology, or the way they understand the relationship between sympathy and pity on the one hand, and comparison and envy on the other. Here, we identify significant differences between our two philosophers which might explain why they have opposing views on the predominance of envy in commercial societies and on the issue of inequalities of wealth as we show in Part 3. Rousseau thinks that envy increases with wealth and inequality and thus pervades commercial societies, while Smith sees envy as the exception rather than the rule, and, moreover, does not provide a historical genesis for envy. For Smith, it is emulation rather than envy which is the driving force of the progress of society.     

浙江加快农业发展方式转变的战略思考

浙江现代农业发展取得了巨大成就,也面临着许多新的矛盾和问题,加快推进农业发展方式转变的战略路径是要构建新型农业生产经营管理体系、产业功能区体系、产业结构体系、科技支撑体系、要素市场体系、社会化服务体系、安全生产体系、支持保护体系。