A Social Dimension for a New Industrial Strategy for Europe

Intereconomics - The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has not been equal across economic sectors, age groups, education levels and employment status.     

Europe After COVID-19: A New Role for German Leadership?

Intereconomics - The German change of attitude concerning fiscal policy and the mutualisation of efforts to fight the pandemic is driven by self-interest, and as such might be structural.     

Extracting information or resource? The Hotelling rule revisited under asymmetric information

A concessionaire has private information on the initial stock of resource. A “virtual Hotelling rule” describes how the resource price evolves over time and how extraction costs are compounded with information costs along the optimal extraction path. Fields which are heterogeneous in terms of their initial stocks follow different extraction paths. Resource might be left unexploited in the long run as a way to foster incentives. The optimal contract may sometimes be implemented through royalties and license fees. With a market of concessionaires, asymmetric information leads to a “virtual Herfindahl principle” and to another form of heterogeneity across active concessionaires.     

The veteran wage differential

There is debate in the literature as to whether military service is rewarded in the economy and the extent to which veterans receive either a wage premium or penalty. In this paper, we take a new approach to this question by conducting a wage decomposition of the veteran wage differential and decomposing the wage distribution of veterans and civilians instead of focusing only on the standard wage gap analysis at the averages. We find the veteran wage differential is driven by observable factors such as education, occupation, and industry, but also by location choice, a factor that has been previously overlooked in the literature. At the average, we find white men experience a veteran penalty whereas black men and women experience a veteran premium consistent with the bridging hypothesis. Additionally, we find that as we move along the wage distribution for all demographic groups, the veteran premium tends to become a veteran penalty, even after accounting for selection into military service. However, once we account for selection, we find that the premium for veteran black men disappears.     

A case-control study on risk factors of domestic accidents in an elderly population

The aim of this study was to evaluate the combined influence of several lifestyle, health and housing factors in the occurrence of home injuries (HIs) among the elderly. The subjects were recruited from 10 hospitals in Rome, Italy. This study is a paired case-control study. Cases included subjects, aged 65-85 years, who visited the Emergency Department for an HI and were subsequently hospitalised (15 September 2004-30 June 2005). Controls were the subjects of the same gender, age (±3 years) and area of residence of cases. A conditional logistic regression model was used for analysing the variables obtained. In this study, we enrolled 107 hospitalised cases. It was found that the living room was the place where 33% of the accidents occurred. Eighty-seven per cent of the accidents were falls, and 33% of the accidents were the immediate consequence of sudden malaise. One-half of the cases reported one or more leg fractures. The variables that were independently associated with HI were poor household illumination, poor emotional status, regular physical activities and housekeeping activities. We conclude that this study shows the areas of intervention to target HI prevention activities.     

Anti-Waste Labeling and Consumer Willingness to Pay

ABSTRACT

Food waste is an important topic in the general context of food consumption sustainability and ethical consumption. Several studies have focused on environment-friendly labeling schemes based on different “ethical attributes,” such as organic, fair trade, and locally grown. However, the effect of a labeling scheme based on food waste prevention has never been studied. In the current work, experimental auctions were used to investigate the effect of a certification about containing food waste within a certain threshold on participants’ willingness to pay. The product chosen for the auctions was the French baguette (500 g) packaged with a paper wrapper. Furthermore, we examined whether the effect would be moderated by different communication strategies about the consequences of wasting. Specifically, two different frames of reference were used: the first is based on the carbon footprint, the other on the water footprint. Our results showed that waste prevention–based labeling positively affected participants’ willingness to pay and that this effect was enhanced by the carbon footprint frame of reference.     

Improving rural livelihoods through the conservation and use of underutilized species: evidence from a community research project in Yemen

The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of a set of interventions related to conservation and use of neglected and underutilized species (NUS) on people's livelihoods. Specifically, a simultaneous three-equation model of households' participation on underutilized crops conservation and income generation activities is applied to evaluate the outcome of a pilot research project implemented by Bioversity International in Yemen between 2002 and 2005. Results generated show a relation between project participation and the perceived yield increase demonstrating the importance for farmers to actively participate in the project's activities and subsequently apply agronomic practices learnt to improve their livelihood. The generated benefits incentivized farmers to continue to apply the interventions beyond the lifetime of the project ensuring thus a sustainable process in which exogenous interventions, once adopted by farmers become integrant part of farmer's agronomic practices.     

Structural Change and Growth in a NEG Model

This paper presents a New Economic Geography model of structural change, agglomeration and growth. Assuming a non‐homothetic preference structure, our results show that a progressive reduction of trade costs allows the economy to pass from a pre‐industrialized to an industrialized stage and then, within the latter, from a dispersed to an urbanized regime. However, the introduction of capital accumulation and the dynamic setting of our model opens the door to a richer set of implications. First, an additional stage is introduced as, for some intermediate values of trade costs, a multiple equilibria regime emerges with simultaneously stable symmetric and core‐periphery equilibria. Second, the introduction of non‐homotheticity introduces a new channel through which growth is affected by trade costs and agglomeration. In particular, integration is always growth‐enhancing while agglomeration is growth‐detrimental.     

Tax morale and tax evasion reports

The study proposes a new measure of tax morale for Italy based on voluntary tax evasion reports. Using this measure, I detected a positive relationship between tax morale and social capital, political participation, and immigration, but a negative relationship between tax morale and the dissatisfaction with public services and unemployment.