Italian Consumers’ Preferences for Pasta and Consumption Trends: Tradition or Innovation?

Abstract

The aim of this study is to know Italian consumers’ preferences for Pasta and consumption habits. Food culture and concerns about food security and product innovation were investigated. A sample of Italian consumers was interviewed. Consumer’ profile, motivations and purchasing behavior were described. Relationships between observed variables and the latent constructs that explain the preferences were highlighted. There is asymmetric information between consumers and producers. Consumers believe Pasta is made with Italian grains, and therefore it is healthy and safe, although that’s not always the case. Intrinsic and extrinsic high quality, which derives from growing and production technologies, is required.     

Resurrecting Keynes to Stabilize the International Monetary System

We adapt the basic principles of the Keynes Plan and argue for the creation of a supranational bank money (SBM) that would coexist along side national currencies and for the establishment of a new international clearing union (NICU). These principles remain timely because the fundamental causes of the instability of the international monetary system are as valid today as they were in the early forties. The new supranational money would be created against domestic earning assets of the Fed and the ECB and its quantity would be demand-driven. Our proposal is not an agreement on exchange rates, which while possible is not essential to the functioning of the SBM. NICU would not hold open positions in assets denominated in national currency and consequently would not bear exchange rate risk. NICU would be more than an office recording credit and debit entries of the supranational bank money. The financial tsunami that hit the world economy in 2007–2008 provides a unique opportunity for a coordinated strategy.

The Bologna Process and widening participation in university education: new evidence from Italy

This paper extends previous work on the effect of the Bologna reform on university enrolment in Italy. The analysis considers more recent data and also attempts to disentangle the effect of the reform from the influence on enrolment exerted by time-varying confounding factors. The empirical findings consistently show that the “Bologna Process” had a positive impact on university participation, though the magnitude of this impact is smaller than previously concluded. One main reason for our lower estimates lies in the use of a difference-in-differences methodology, which allows us to control for the influence on enrolment exerted by unobserved factors that could have changed coincidentally at the same time as the reform.     

Board Monitoring and Earnings Management Pre- and Post-IFRS

In this paper, we address the question of whether the board of directors is more effective in constraining earnings management after the mandatory application of IFRS. Specifically, we explore how two board characteristics — board independence and (2) the existence of an audit committee impact earnings management. Our empirical results suggest that board independence and audit committees play an important and effective role in reducing earnings management after the introduction of IFRS and that the accounting regulatory framework significantly contributes to the effectiveness of the two corporate governance mechanisms. Our findings also confirm that a company's corporate governance characteristics remain an important determinant of earnings quality; therefore, an analysis of the effects of new regulations must consider firm-level determinants.     

Political uncertainty and risk premia

We develop a general equilibrium model of government policy choice in which stock prices respond to political news. The model implies that political uncertainty commands a risk premium whose magnitude is larger in weaker economic conditions. Political uncertainty reduces the value of the implicit put protection that the government provides to the market. It also makes stocks more volatile and more correlated, especially when the economy is weak. We find empirical evidence consistent with these predictions.     

Going Public and the Sale of Shares with Heterogeneous Investors: Agent‐Based Computational Modelling and Computer Simulations

In this paper we use agent‐based computational modelling and computer simulations to examine the interrelationship between different selling strategies for going public. A great deal of recent empirical evidence suggests that to maximise the revenue raised from the shares sold in the public offering, it is fundamental to choose the appropriate design for the sale which, in turn, reflects the final ownership structure. This literature establishes that the market for shares is segmented and, particularly, that firms manage the sale of shares with the purpose of discriminating between relatively small and passive investors and applicants for large potentially controlling blocks. One of the key questions in this area, then, is: How and to what extent should this heterogeneity among potential investors influence the firm's strategy for selling shares? Here we attempt to address this question from the standpoint of using agent‐based computational modelling and computer simulations. Results show that the design of the sale is an important determinant of the performance of the negotiation process through which the firm is sold. A sequential sale beginning with an initial public offering of dispersed shares, followed by a negotiated sale of a controlling block is, in general, more effective than other alternative selling strategies. Changing the negotiation protocol itself can act as an effective way of impacting upon the revenue raised and the length of the process. The interrelationship between the method of sale and the performance may also depend on the degree of cognitive accuracy that characterises the negotiating agents' mental representations of their physical and social environment.     

Exploring the link between innovation and growth in Chilean firms

We investigate the relation between the introduction of innovation and subsequent firm growth employing a dataset representative of the Chilean productive structure. By means of quantile treatment effects (QTE), we estimate the effect of the introduction of innovation by comparing firms with a similar propensity to innovate for different quantiles of the firm growth distribution. Our results indicate that process innovation positively affects sales growth for those firms located at the 75th and 90th percentiles. Contrarily, product innovation appears not to be a driver of firm performance. We also find that process innovation benefits mature firms at higher quantiles while it positively affects young firms located at low-medium quantiles.     

Family CEO and board service: Turning the tide for export scope in family SMEs

Adopting the socioemotional wealth perspective, we argue that the presence of a family CEO in family SMEs negatively affects export scope, but that such negative effect is mitigated by board service. We develop and test a model that considers the synergistic combination of family management and another important aspect of family governance in the context of family firm internationalization: the service behavior of the board of directors. The empirical evidence from a sample of 248 Belgian family SMEs shows that governance is crucial to overcoming the problems of family management: family CEOs may negatively influence export scope, but board service is able to turn the tide so that the family CEO effect becomes positive. With such novel findings, we contribute to international business and family business studies     

The Pricing of Italian Equity Returns

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between common risk factors and average returns for Italian stocks. Our research has identified the Italian stock market's economic variables by using the results from factor analyses and time series regressions. We study several multi‐factor models combining the relevant macroeconomic variables with the mimicking equity portfolios SMB (small minus big) and HML (high minus low) proposed by Fama and French (1993). The key question we want to ask ourselves, is whether the influential role of the size and book‐to‐market equity factors in explaining average stock returns can stand up well when competing with some macroeconomic factors. In other words, do stock returns carry some risk premium that is independent of either the market return or the economic forces that underlie the common variation in returns? Our empirical work estimates risk premiums using both traditional two‐pass procedures and one‐pass (full information) methodologies. We show that only the market index and variables linked to interest rate shifts are consistently priced in the Italian stock returns. The role of other factors, and in particular both the size and the price‐to book ratio, are crucially dependent on the estimation procedure. (J.E.L.: G11, G12).