How limiting deceptive practices harms consumers

There are two competing sellers of an experience good, one offers high quality, one low. The low‐quality seller can engage in deceptive advertising, potentially fooling a buyer into thinking the product is better than it is. Although deceptive advertising might seem to harm the buyer, we show that he could be better off when the low‐quality seller can engage in deceptive advertising than not. We characterize the optimal deterrence rule that a regulatory agency seeking to punish deceptive practices should adopt. We show that greater protection against deceptive practices does not necessarily improve the buyer welfare.     

Stature decline and recovery in a food-rich export economy: Argentina 1900-1934

Using height data for recruits of a principal regiment at Buenos Aires, the paper revises the question of welfare in Argentina during the period 1900-1934. The period of rapid export-led growth (1900-1913) showed an absolute deterioration of “net nutrition.” On the other hand, the inter-war period (1918-1939), generally characterized as a period of economic “delay” or “retardation,” presented a steady improvement in nutrition and health conditions. Two powerful external shocks, World War I and the Great Depression, had a minimal impact on the biological welfare of Argentine recruits. Economic growth generated important regional and social inequalities.     

Data editing and quality of daily diaries in the Italian Time use survey

In the Italian Time use survey, carried out by Istat (Italian National Statistical Institute) in 2002–2003, the coding process translates the sentences reported by the respondents into codes, but association text-code is not a one to one easy linkage, because the respondents describe the activities performed using the common language. So, a process of data editing is requested in order to improve data quality. The possibility to use sentences (recorded in the data entry) has definitely improved the data editing process. The main questions to analyse concern:

The nexus between corruption and academic freedom: An international investigation of the underlying linkages

Studying a relatively under-researched aspect in economics, this paper examines the nexus between corruption and academic freedom. Our main hypothesis is that greater corruption undermines academic freedom and we test this hypothesis using data for 104 nations from 2012 to 2018. Our results support the main hypothesis, and this finding also generally holds across alternative aspects of academic freedom. Another contribution of this work lies in dissecting the direct and indirect (through corruption) effects of various drivers of academic freedom. Finally, additional insights are gained by considering different dimensions of academic freedom and how they are impacted by corruption.     

A fuzzy set theory based computational model to represent the quality of inter-rater agreement

In this paper we present a method to evaluate the quality of a rater’s judgement, which can integrate and enrich the use of inter-rater agreement as a reliability measure. Our proposal is an integrative one and evaluates the quality of a rater’s performance through an analysis of the profile of that individual rater’s performance. We discuss its rationale on the basis of the interpretation of inter-rater agreement, highlighting some critical issues. For this purpose, we adopt a computational model based on fuzzy set theory, demonstrating its main characteristics with an exemplary case study.     

Regression with imputed covariates: A generalized missing-indicator approach

A common problem in applied regression analysis is that covariate values may be missing for some observations but imputed values may be available. This situation generates a trade-off between bias and precision: the complete cases are often disarmingly few, but replacing the missing observations with the imputed values to gain precision may lead to bias. In this paper, we formalize this trade-off by showing that one can augment the regression model with a set of auxiliary variables so as to obtain, under weak assumptions about the imputations, the same unbiased estimator of the parameters of interest as complete-case analysis. Given this augmented model, the bias-precision trade-off may then be tackled by either model reduction procedures or model averaging methods. We illustrate our approach by considering the problem of estimating the relation between income and the body mass index (BMI) using survey data affected by item non-response, where the missing values on the main covariates are filled in by imputations.     

Managing Environmental Risk in Presence of Climate Change: The Role of Adaptation in the Nile Basin of Ethiopia

This study investigates the impact of climate change adaptation on farm households’ downside risk exposure in the Nile Basin of Ethiopia. The analysis relies on a moment-based specification of the stochastic production function. We use an empirical strategy that accounts for the heterogeneity in the decision on whether to adapt or not, and for unobservable characteristics of farmers and their farm. We find that past adaptation to climate change (i) reduces current downside risk exposure, and so the risk of crop failure; (ii) would have been more beneficial to the non-adapters if they adapted, in terms of reduction in downside risk exposure; and (iii) is a successful risk management strategy that makes the adapters more resilient to climatic conditions.     

Sri Lankans’ residential segregation and spatial inequalities in Southern Italy: an empirical analysis using fine-scale data on regular lattice geographies

Quality & Quantity - Sri Lankans constitute one of Italy's oldest foreign communities. A comparative geographic study of Sri Lankans’ settlement patterns in three main municipalities...     

The effects of environmental,social and governance disclosure on the cost of capital in small and medium enterprises: The role of family business status

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure has become a critical component of corporate reporting. However, the effectiveness of this type of disclosure remains poorly explored among small and medium enterprises (SMEs), despite the fact that these businesses represent the majority of firms around the world. By leveraging on a dataset of Italian listed SMEs, we fill this gap to shed new light on the effects of nonfinancial disclosure on the cost of capital. The study reveals that, in stark contrast with the evidence on large companies, environmental disclosure for SMEs is bound to provoke an increase in the cost of capital. Yet this pattern is capsized when the company is a family SME, as it benefits from environmental disclosure, as large companies do.     

Anti-Malthus: Conflict and the evolution of societies

The Malthusian theory of evolution disregards a pervasive fact about human societies: they expand through conflict. When this is taken account of the long-run favors not a large population at the level of subsistence, nor yet institutions that maximize welfare or per capita output, but rather institutions that generate large amount of free resources and direct these towards state power. Free resources are the output available to society after deducting the payments necessary for subsistence and for the incentives needed to induce production, and the other claims to production such as transfer payments and resources absorbed by elites. We develop the evolutionary underpinnings of this model, and examine the implications for the evolution of societies in several applications. Since free resources are increasing both in per capita income and population, evolution will favor large rich societies. We will show how technological improvement can increase or decrease per capita output as well as increasing population.