Endogenous incompleteness of financial markets: The role of ambiguity and ambiguity aversion

Incompleteness of financial markets has been widely questioned in the literature, but traditional research has been mainly focused on the role of transaction costs and asymmetric information in determining such incompleteness. This paper, instead, focuses on agents’ preferences, showing that the introduction of ambiguity and ambiguity aversion may induce investors to restrict their trading to a simpler set of assets, relative to which they are less likely to make errors.     

Urban rail systems investments: an analysis of the impacts on property values and residents’ location

Light rail, metro and other urban rail transit systems can play a significant role in improving the attractiveness and quality of urban public transport. They can influence the attractiveness of locations near the stations and improve accessibility for these locations. Furthermore urban rail can improve a location’s attractiveness by its image effect: it makes a station appear modern and dynamic, and thus raises the status of this location.This paper summarises findings on the land-use and economic impacts of the urban rail system of the city of Naples over time and space. It examines changes in residential and non-residential (offices and retail) property prices around the newly built stations between 2001 and 2008 as well as the changes in the number of residents for the same station catchment areas. Ad hoc station control areas have been specified in order to compare the results of these changes. Results show that values in station control areas are lower than those of those of the stations catchment areas.     

Beyond virtues and vices: Antonio Genovesi's and Adam Smith's “science of relationships”

ABSTRACT

Some recent literature has rediscovered the Italian tradition of “civil economy”. This literature has underlined how the discourse about virtues and vices was fundamental in order to establish how, in a political and economic context, a harmonious order could be established. On the basis of this main focus on virtues and vices, it was stated that Genovesi's thought is essentially different from Smith's one. In this article, I argue that the direct focus on questions of virtues and vices does not help capture the novelty introduced by these authors and the relational value of their agency theory.     

Organic‐ and Animal Welfare‐labelled Eggs: Competing for the Same Consumers?

To understand the market for sustainable foods, it is important to allow for heterogeneous preferences. However, most studies of consumer preferences for sustainable foods only investigate average consumer preferences. They do not take into account that some consumer segments attempt to purchase as much sustainable food as possible, others are almost indifferent to the notion of sustainable food, and still others consider sustainable food a complete hoax. The aim of this study is to explore the preferences for various types of premium eggs across three consumer segments. We conduct a choice experiment including 900 Norwegian consumers and perform a behavioural segmentation based on the frequency of organic food purchase. We find that the segment purchasing the most organic food is, as expected, willing to pay a significant premium for organic eggs over eggs displaying only enhanced animal welfare. However, most consumers, who only occasionally purchase organic products, are unwilling to pay more for organic eggs than for enhanced animal welfare eggs, suggesting diminishing marginal utility for additional attributes. We find that a third consumer segment attempts to avoid organic eggs, even when they cost the same as other eggs. Our findings suggest that organic products will be unsuccessful in acquiring a larger share of the market as long as most consumers are unwilling to pay a premium for organic products with all their cost increasing sustainable attributes over products that have only a single sustainable attribute, in our case enhanced animal welfare.     

Poverty trap,boom and bust periods and growth. A nonlinear model for non-developed and developing countries

This work investigates the qualitative and quantitative dynamics of a Solow–Swan growth model with differential savings as proposed by Böhm and Kaas (J Econ Dyn Control 24:965–980, 2000) assuming the shifted Cobb–Douglas (SCD) production function (see Capasso et al. in Nonlinear Anal. 11:3858–3876, 2010) which makes it possible to consider the long-run dynamics of non-developed and developing countries as well as that of developed economies. The resulting model is described by a nonlinear discontinuous map generating both a poverty trap and complex dynamics. Furthermore, multistability phenomena may emerge: besides the “vicious circle of poverty”, long-run behaviours may include boom and bust periods. Complex basins can emerge, hence, economic policies trying to raise the capital per capita may fail and economies may be captured by the poverty trap.