Interactions between Brands and CO Labels: The Case of “Bavarian Beer” and “Munich Beer” – Application of a Conditional Logit Model

ABSTRACT

For the past four decades ‘country-of-origin’ (CO) research has been discussing the value of designations such as ‘Made in Germany’ or ‘Made in USA.’ However, published studies have not usually investigated brand-specific effects of ‘country-of-origin’ (CO labels). This article employs a choice experiment in order to analyse the impact of a CO label applied to branded food products. For this purpose, a nationwide survey was carried out in Germany to measure the effect of the geographical indications ‘Bavarian beer’ and ‘Munich Beer’ on brand choice. The results indicate that weak unknown brands can benefit especially from the labeling of geographical indications.     

Learning in games with strategic complementarities revisited

Fictitious play is a classical learning process for games, and games with strategic complementarities are an important class including many economic applications. Knowledge about convergence properties of fictitious play in this class of games is scarce, however. Beyond games with a unique equilibrium, global convergence has only been claimed for games with diminishing returns [V. Krishna, Learning in games with strategic complementarities, HBS Working Paper 92-073, Harvard University, 1992]. This result remained unpublished, and it relies on a specific tie-breaking rule. Here we prove an extension of it by showing that the ordinal version of strategic complementarities suffices. The proof does not rely on tie-breaking rules and provides some intuition for the result.     

Fiscal Federalism in Transition: Evidence from Ukraine

Effects of fiscal federalism on redistribution and economic growth are analyzed for Ukraine, a country with large regional differences. Since there is virtually no such empirical literature, except a study of the German case, and since there are several potential flaws, the results must be interpreted in a very tentative way. We find that this relatively poor, disorganized country with little democracy has effectively redistributed income from relatively wealthy to relatively poor regions and thus promoted regional economic convergence, and even dampened the recession in both types of regions. We also find that the evidence does not reject the view that relatively poor regions used the transfers in a growth-conducive fashion, and the paper argues that the findings may have implications beyond the case of Ukraine. But the analysis is tricky, uncertain, and merely a small step to an interesting research issue.     

Sollte der Bankensektor stärker reguliert werden?

Nachdem die Immobilienkrise in den USA auch Deutschland erreicht und die IKB Deutsche Industriebank AG sowie die s?chsische Landesbank Sachsen LB in Schwierigkeiten gebracht hat, werden Forderungen laut, die Banken st?rker zu regulieren. Was sind die Ursachen für die Schwierigkeiten der deutschen Banken? Hat die Bankenaufsicht Fehler gemacht? Sollte sie reformiert werden? Ist eine Vereinheitlichung der Bankenaufsicht auf der EU-Ebene erforderlich?     

An Implicit Törnqvist Index of Real GDP

Recently much attention has been devoted to superlative indexes in the context of the national accounts. In this paper we advocate the use of the implicit Törnqvist quantity index to measure real GDP. This index, which has been proposed by Diewert and Morrison (1986), has never received serious consideration in the literature. Yet, compared to the better-known Fisher index, the implicit Törnqvist index of real GDP has a number of advantages. Thus, it can be shown to be exact for the Translog GDP function, it allows for a complete multiplicative decomposition of nominal and real GDP, and it is consistent with state-of-the-art measures of total factor productivity that typically rely on the Törnqvist aggregation. Estimates for a sample of 26 countries are reported. We find that the Laspeyres quantity index still used by the statistical agencies of most countries tends to underestimate real growth. Over the 1960–1996 period, the cumulated shortfall was as much as 13.4% of GDP in the case of Japan.