The Public Health Implications of Consumers' Environmental Concern and Their Willingness to Pay for an Eco‐Friendly Product

Environmental concern has been an important topic for more than 40 years and has recently become even more critical with today's concerns about creating a sustainable and healthy environment. This research examines factors affecting an individual's willingness to pay more for an environmentally friendly product. Our results show that willingness to pay more differs across demographic groups. We also find that individuals who rate concern for waste as highly important are willing to spend more money on an eco‐friendly product. Consequently, our findings provide insight into the development of appropriate educational strategies for different consumer groups to encourage consumers to purchase eco‐friendly products, with a goal of creating a healthier environment for current and future generations.     

Money Market Integration

We use transaction-level data and detailed modeling of the high-frequency behavior of federal funds–Eurodollar spreads to provide evidence of strong integration of the U.S. markets for federal funds and Eurodollars, the two core components of the dollar money market. Our evidence of negligible federal funds–Eurodollar premia contrasts with previous findings of large and predictable premia, which have been interpreted as evidence of segmentation between the markets for federal funds and Eurodollars. Our results, however, are consistent with possible persistent segmentation within the global Eurodollar market. We document several patterns in the behavior of federal funds–Eurodollar spreads, including liquidity effects from trading volume to yield spreads' volatility.     

Effectiveness of Mediation Strategies in Collective Bargaining

Effectiveness of mediation strategies is analyzed in two different types of collective labor conflicts: rights conflicts and conflicts of interests. The sample consists of 106 professional labor mediators who completed a questionnaire about the strategies they used and the outcomes they achieved in their most recent mediation intervention. Results from regression analysis indicate that while the use of substantive and contextual strategies is positively related to effectiveness in both types of conflict, the use of reflexive strategies is negatively related to effectiveness, particularly in rights conflicts.     

THE CAPITAL INFLOWS PROBLEM: CONCEPTS AND ISSUES

Since 1990, capital has flowed from industrial countries to developing regions like Latin America and parts of Asia. Most countries welcome reentry into international capital markets. However, capital inflows often are associated with inflationary pressures, a real exchange rate appreciation, a deterioration in the current account, and a boom in bank lending. This paper briefly examines how these inflows have altered the macroeconomic environment in a number of Asian and Latin American countries, and discusses the pros and cons of the policy options .     

LEGAL INSTITUTIONS,INNOVATION, AND GROWTH

We analyze the relationship between legal institutions, innovation, and growth. We compare a rigid legal system (the law is set before the technological innovation) and a flexible one (the law is set after observing the new technology). The flexible system dominates in terms of welfare, amount of innovation, and output growth at intermediate stages of technological development—periods when legal change is needed. The rigid system is preferable at early stages of technological development, when commitment problems are severe. For mature technologies, the two legal systems are equivalent. We find that rigid legal systems may induce excessive R&D investment.     

Credit Rationing and Credit View: Empirical Evidence from an Ethical Bank in Italy

Attempts have been made in the empirical literature to identify credit rationing and its determinants using balance sheet data or evidence from corporate surveys. However, observational equivalence, identification problems, and interview biases are serious problems in these studies. We analyze directly the determinants of credit rationing in credit files by examining the difference between the amounts demanded by and supplied to each borrower, as shown by official bank records. Our findings provide microeconomic evidence that supports the credit view hypothesis by showing that the European Central Bank refinancing rate is significantly and positively related to partial (but not total) credit rationing. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that this variable affects the total volume of bank loans.     

INTERTEMPORAL COMPETITION AND AID

We study donor–recipient relationships in which the donor finances aid programs from which recipients want to divert funds in order to meet their own objectives. We analyze two economies. In the first one, the donor commits to a program budget for each period. In the second economy, the donor commits to a program budget for two periods. This introduces intertemporal competition among recipient officials. We show that intertemporal competition may weaken recipients' incentives to divert funds from aid programs. Furthermore, we show that this may occur even in the presence of regional competition among recipients.     

CHARACTERIZATION AND ANALYSIS OF COOPERATIVE MERGERS AND THEIR RESULTS

This study characterizes the mergers and acquisitions undertaken in the Spanish agrifood sector during the period 1995–2005. First, it aims to establish the pre‐merger financial characteristics of the merging cooperatives in comparison with other firms in the agrifood sector. For this, the financial situation is analyzed in the different types of merger carried out (merger by formation or merger by acquisition), and the different roles played by the cooperatives (acquiring, acquired or involved in a merger in which a new cooperative is formed). The second and final objective is to determine whether these mergers have managed to improve the economic‐financial situation of the companies involved, either by increasing income and size or by reducing relative costs. For this purpose, several non parametric tests and a probit model were used. The results show that on average following a merger there were no statistically significant improvements in the economic‐financial indicators studied.     

The Effectiveness of Unconventional Monetary Policy at the Zero Lower Bound: A Cross‐Country Analysis

This paper assesses the macroeconomic effects of unconventional monetary policies by estimating a panel vector autoregression (VAR) with monthly data from eight advanced economies over a sample spanning the period since the onset of the global financial crisis. It finds that an exogenous increase in central bank balance sheets at the zero lower bound leads to a temporary rise in economic activity and consumer prices. The estimated output effects turn out to be qualitatively similar to the ones found in the literature on the effects of conventional monetary policy, while the impact on the price level is weaker and less persistent. Individual country results suggest that there are no major differences in the macroeconomic effects of unconventional monetary policies across countries, despite the heterogeneity of the measures that were taken.