Assessing environmental product declaration opportunities: a reference framework

The growing awareness about environmental issues places greater responsibility on firms to transmit information about the environmental quality of their products. One of the most innovative ways to achieve this objective is through the ‘environmental product declaration’. Unfortunately, from an operating viewpoint, there is a very little evidence on the effects associated with the introduction of this label. In lieu of this context, the paper suggests operating guidelines and a methodological approach for managers who aim to understand under which conditions the EPD can represent a useful tool for the company's competitiveness. In particular, the paper will identify

• 1 the specific peculiarities and requirements of the EPD;
• 2 the EPD parameters of attractiveness, related to its potential costs and benefits;
• 3 an operational framework in order to assess the EPD target audience.

In this respect, an empirical analysis on 17 Italian firms will be carried out. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

CSR Practices and Corporate Strategy: Evidence from a Longitudinal Case Study

This paper aims to contribute to the present debate about business ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) that the Journal of Business Ethics is hosting. Numerous contributions argued theoretical frameworks and taxonomies of CSR practices. The authors want to ground in this knowledge and provide further evidence about how companies adopt CSR practices to address stakeholders’ claims and consolidate their trust. Evidence was provided by a longitudinal case study about an Italian food company that is one of the largest producers of baby food. This company reshaped its corporate strategy along three decades through the adoption of CSR practices in order to win stakeholders’ trust about food safety and supply chain behaviour. The empirical exercise was informed by a literature review of the relevant contributions in terms of CSR business practices and levels of efforts to adopt them. In light of this review, the authors adopted for the research framework the taxonomy of business practices proposed by Spiller (2000, “Ethical Business and Investment: A Model for Business and Society”, Journal of Business Ethics 27, 149-160) and the levels of commitment towards CSR proposed by Stahl and Grigsby (1997, Strategic Management; Total Quality & Global Competition (Blackwell, Oxford)). The main findings are discussed in order to argue theoretical implications and identify further areas of research and debate.     

A simple model of income,aggregate demand and the process of credit creation by private banks

This paper presents a small macroeconomic model describing the main mechanisms of the process of creation by the private banking system. The model is composed of a core unit—where the dynamics of income, credit and aggregate demand are determined—and a set of sectoral accounts that ensure its stock-flow consistency. In order to grasp the role of credit and banks on the functioning of the economic system we make an explicit distinction between planned and realized variables, thanks to which, while maintaining the ex-post accounting consistency, we are able to introduce an ex-ante wedge between current aggregate income and planned expenditure. Private banks are the only economic agents capable of filling this gap through the creation of new credit. Through the use of numerical simulation we discuss the link between credit creation and the expansion of economic activity, also contributing to a recent academic debate on the relation between income, debt and aggregate demand.     

Strategic management implications for the adoption of technological innovations in agricultural tractor: the role of scale factors and environmental attitude

Technological innovations in agricultural tractors have revolutionised farming, increased labour productivity and reduced operator's hazards. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relation between agricultural tractors’ technological innovations and farm size, as well as users’ attitude on environmental impact of agricultural tractors according to their age and years of activity in the farm. Results, concerning Italy, highlight that high technological innovations of tractors are associated to larger farms, which are managed professionally by more efficient and sophisticated agricultural machineries. Empirical evidence also shows that the older the tractor adopters are and the longer they have been working in agriculture, the higher is their commitment to environment protection and safe working conditions. These results could be important for critical strategic management implications to spur technological innovation in agricultural tractors that better satisfy farmer's needs and to support the fruitful adoption of innovations for an efficient and safe modern agriculture.     

Time–Space Harmonization of Consumer Price Indexes in Euro-Zone Countries

The objective of this paper is to discuss the possibilities of attaining a time–space harmonization of the consumer price indexes that are elaborated by the 12 European Union (EU) Euro-zone countries and by Eurostat. After focusing on the duality of the time and space domains for price indexes elaboration, the basic elements of the methodology of estimation of consumer price indexes are delineated, both in time and space. Then, the harmonization of formulae and baskets is outlined, with emphasis on the latter. The current system of surveys for price collection is reviewed and its limits are underlined, in order to suggest a methodology for a consumer basket harmonized approach which ensures better harmonized indexes comparability, reduction of list of products, and unification of quality adjustment methods.     

Time-to-market in vertically differentiated industries

This paper analyzes the optimal time to introduce a new product in a vertical differentiated market when the delay between innovation and market opening can be shortened through investments whose costs increase, the shorter the desired delay. The timing process is affected by the trade-off between being first and getting monopoly profits, and postponing entry for reducing time-to-market costs. We study the balance of these forces and how this balance is influenced by market structure. In our model, it is possible a priori to observe at the optimal solution both a quality-upgrading equilibrium (first entering the market with the low quality good and then marketing the high quality variant) and quality-downgrading equilibrium (first entering the market with the high quality good and then marketing the low quality variant) while in the existing published literature a quality-upgrading equilibrium is always observed.     

Identification in Structural Vector Autoregressive Models with Structural Changes,with an Application to US Monetary Policy

A growing line of research makes use of structural changes and different volatility regimes found in the data in a constructive manner to improve the identification of structural parameters in structural vector autoregressions (SVARs). A standard assumption made in the literature is that the reduced form unconditional error covariance matrix varies while the structural parameters remain constant. Under this hypothesis, it is possible to identify the SVAR without needing to resort to additional restrictions. With macroeconomic data, the assumption that the transmission mechanism of the shocks does not vary across volatility regimes is debatable. We derive novel necessary and sufficient rank conditions for local identification of SVARs, where both the error covariance matrix and the structural parameters are allowed to change across volatility regimes. Our approach generalizes the existing literature on ‘identification through changes in volatility’ to a broader framework and opens up interesting possibilities for practitioners. An empirical illustration focuses on a small monetary policy SVAR of the US economy and suggests that monetary policy has become more effective at stabilizing the economy since the 1980s.     

Vertical integration,foreclosure, and productive efficiency

We analyze the consequences of vertical integration by a monopoly producer dealing with two retailers (downstream firms) of varying efficiency via secret two‐part tariffs. When integrated with the inefficient retailer, the monopoly producer does not foreclose the rival retailer due to an output‐shifting effect. This effect can induce the integrated firm to engage in below‐cost pricing at the wholesale level, thereby rendering integration procompetitive. Output shifting arises with homogeneous and differentiated products. Moreover, we show that integration with an inefficient retailer emerges in a model with uncertainty over retailers' costs, and this merger can be procompetitive in expectation.