Family life in grocery stores – a study of interaction between adults and children

Today the family is seen as a unit for food choice and consumption. The influence of family members on food choice comprises several stages that can be carried out both in the private home and in the public sphere, such as the grocery store. This makes the grocery store a context in which ordinary family life can be observed. The aim was to study families and the interaction between children and adults in the grocery store, focusing on young people's involvement in food shopping. Hidden observation and family interview methods were used. A total of 338 people were observed in seven different grocery stores in Stockholm during the summer and autumn of 2003. Seven family interviews, involving a total of 29 persons, were conducted in Uppsala in the spring of 2003. In the interviews, parents reported avoiding shopping for food together with children as they experienced it as stressful and exhausting. The observations showed that family life in the grocery store comprises not only the food purchase, but also bringing up children and consumer education. Young people's involvement in the food purchase varied depending on their age and the specific product. The different behaviour observed may be interpreted as reflecting the variation in ways of bringing up children at home. Another conclusion is that a public place such the grocery store facilitates pedagogical situations and can work as a tool for informal education.     

Restructuring Ukrainian enterprises after privatization: Does ownership matter?

This paper presents data from a survey of large and medium-sized industrial enterprises in Ukraine after privatization. To analyze this data, regression equations are estimated and explain the response of restructuring and performance indicators to ownership structures, competitive pressures, and hardening budget constraints. While ownership matters less for restructuring activity than competition and budget constraints, concentrated outside ownership does have a significant positive impact on the firm's performance. This research was financially supported by a grant from the International Association for Promotion of Cooperation with Scientists in the New Independent States of the Former Soviet Union (952-0280) and by a Research Fellowship provided by Konferenz der Deutschen Akademien der Wissenschaften, sponsored by Volkswagen Stiftung.     

Portfolio management without probabilities or statistics

Considered here is on-line portfolio management aimed at maximizing the long-run growth of financial wealth. The portfolio is repeatedly rebalanced in response to observed returns on diverse assets. Suppose statistical information and related methods are not available—or deemed too difficult. On that assumption this paper explores how an adaptive procedure, which totally dispenses with statistics and associated competence, nonetheless may solve the problem over time.     

Trade creation and the status of FTAs: empirical evidence from East Asia

East Asia has been considered a latecomer with respect to Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). Since the turn of the last century, however, FTAs with East Asian participation have seen an intra- and extra-regional expansion. Many trade initiatives have been proposed, negotiated or even implemented. This introduces interesting perspectives for the analysis of trade agreements regarding their anticipatory trade effects. This paper focuses on the trade impact of FTAs at different stages that East Asian economies participate in. The central part of this study is an econometric analysis that applies panel data to the gravity model of international trade flows. We augment the traditional model with variables to estimate trade effects of bilateral and multilateral agreements and year-to-year changes in the stages of their implementation. Our results reveal that there exist anticipatory effects preceding the actual implementation of bilateral FTAs with East Asian participation. Further, anticipation effects are larger for bilateral than for multilateral agreements, possibly because the realisation of bilateral agreements is considered more realistic.     

Consumer acceptability and perceptions of maize meal in Giyani,South Africa

This study examined the acceptability and perceptions of traditionally prepared maize meal porridge, cooked from commercial roller-mill white maize meal and hammer-mill white and yellow maize meal (with and without fibre), among female Tsonga consumers in Giyani in Limpopo Province, South Africa. The study used sensory evaluation tests, followed by focus group discussions to gather supportive information about consumer attitudes, perceptions and practices regarding the consumption of maize meal porridge prepared from these maize meal types. Giyani consumers preferred commercial roller-mill white sifted fortified and white super-fortified maize meal, but, contrary to popular belief, were also willing to accept hammer-mill yellow maize meal, mainly for its nutritional value.     

Dynamics in ICT cooperation networks in selected German ICT clusters

High innovation capability is indispensable for generating economic growth in developed economies. Cooperations in the innovation process are entered into by companies for reasons of risk diversification or costs and often considered to be an efficient strategy to increase a company’s knowledge basis. Regional economic literature very often believes that regional agglomeration of companies, i.e. cluster formation, will also lead to increased local networking, i.e. also to cooperations between companies or between company and research institutes in the innovation process. A social network analysis of the two German ICT regions performed with patent data was able to show that cluster formation coincides with a dynamic increase of cooperations measured by joint patent applications. However, the cooperations are characterized by integration of extra-regional companies and research institutes rather than being intraregional.     

Model-free portfolio theory: A rough path approach

Based on a rough path foundation, we develop a model-free approach to stochastic portfolio theory (SPT). Our approach allows to handle significantly more general portfolios compared to previous model-free approaches based on Föllmer integration. Without the assumption of any underlying probabilistic model, we prove a pathwise formula for the relative wealth process, which reduces in the special case of functionally generated portfolios to a pathwise version of the so-called master formula of classical SPT. We show that the appropriately scaled asymptotic growth rate of a far reaching generalization of Cover's universal portfolio based on controlled paths coincides with that of the best retrospectively chosen portfolio within this class. We provide several novel results concerning rough integration, and highlight the advantages of the rough path approach by showing that (nonfunctionally generated) log-optimal portfolios in an ergodic Itô diffusion setting have the same asymptotic growth rate as Cover's universal portfolio and the best retrospectively chosen one.     

The integration of Japan into the world economy and its meaning for Germany

Japan is currently still characterized by a low degree of import integration in the field of finished products. What are the reasons behind this? What can be done to remove the existing trade imbalances vis-à-vis Western industrialized countries? What, on the other hand, can be learned from the Japanese?