Search results

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the market of rosé wines in Italy, to outline retail strategies and to investigate to what extent the price is affected by branding these wines.

A survey has been carried out on retailers by collecting data about wines as intrinsic attributes (grape variety, blending, origin, alcohol content, etc.) and extrinsic attributes (brand, price, packaging, etc.) and about outlet and retail environment. The hedonic analysis required a rearrangement of data survey, while a Box-Cox transformation allowed to control the strong heteroskedasticity detected of the data.

Results provide strategies for still, semi-sparkling and sparkling rosé market segments. Still rosé wines are strongly differentiated, while the price is affected by the appellation, grape variety, blending, brand and outlet features. Two main strategies are suggested: the first focuses on appellations endorsing consumer’s brand loyalty; the second is driven by retailers while involving weaker brands. Different pictures emerged for semi-sparkling and sparkling wines, as producers and retailers tend to follow consumer’s preferences for fresh and easy drinking wines as well as to extend the product assortment.

Results for sparkling rosé wines cannot be generalized. The high fragmentation hinders the hedonic model performance in capturing the price effects of brands, appellations, grape variety and wine blend.

The hedonic analysis provides suggestions for rosé wine producers that should reinforce their brand through associations among intrinsic attributes, such as appellation, and extrinsic ones, such as price, while satisfying retailer requirements.

The paper contributes to the knowledge base about the Italian rosé wine market, which is mostly export-oriented. Model results help to understand why the domestic consumption is stagnant with respect to other countries such as France or the USA.

The purpose of this paper is to review the barriers in the dissemination of effective smoking cessation treatments and services globally. Offering tobacco users help to stop using tobacco is a key demand reduction measure outlined under Article 14 of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). Implementing Article 14 can reap great dividends for the billion plus tobacco users around the world and their families, friends and societies.

A review of the status of the global implementation of Article 14 using available literature on smoking cessation products, services and national guidelines. Discussing innovative approaches being currently explored in South Asia that can lead to faster adoption and implementation of Article 14 globally.

Major gaps remain in cessation products’ availability and resource allocation for cessation services globally. Current licensed products are falling short on delivering and sustaining smoking cessation. Innovation in cessation products and services needs to build on learnings in nicotine pharmacokinetics, behavioural insights from consumer research and tap into 21st century tools such as mobile based apps. National implementation of FCTC’s Article 14 needs to follow guidelines that encourage integration into existing health programmes and health-care practitioners’ (HCPs) upskilling.

Smoking cessation is a desirable health outcome and nicotine replacement products are a means of achieving cessation through tobacco harm reduction. E-cigarettes are sophisticated nicotine replacement products. Innovation is urgently needed to fill the gaps in smoking cessation products and services, and for converting global policy into local practice. In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), HCPs’ knowledge, attitudes and practice regarding tobacco use and cessation may hold the key to rapidly scaling up cessation support and delivery to achieve FCTC objectives sooner. Additionally, HCPs can play an important role in offering smoking cessation support in existing national health programmes for TB, cancer screening and maternal and child health. Also, widely prevalent smartphone devices may deliver smoking cessation through telemedicine in LMICs sooner, leapfrogging the hurdles of the existing health-care infrastructure.

“Economics is a Serious Subject.” Edwin Cannan.

IT is fitting that a new series of this magazine should be introduced by some reflections on the whole question of book selection, both for the general public and libraries.

Chester Whitney Wright (1879–1966) received his A.B. in 1901, A.M. in 1902 and Ph.D. in 1906, all from Harvard University. After teaching at Cornell University during 1906–1907, he taught at the University of Chicago from 1907 to 1944. Wright was the author of Economic History of the United States (1941, 1949); editor of Economic Problems of War and Its Aftermath (1942), to which he contributed a chapter on economic lessons from previous wars, and other chapters were authored by John U. Nef (war and the early industrial revolution) and by Frank H. Knight (the war and the crisis of individualism); and co-editor of Materials for the Study of Elementary Economics (1913). Wright’s Wool-Growing and the Tariff received the David Ames Wells Prize for 1907–1908, and was volume 5 in the Harvard Economic Studies. I am indebted to Holly Flynn for assistance in preparing Wright’s biography and in tracking down incomplete references; to Marianne Johnson in preparing many tables and charts; and to F. Taylor Ostrander, as usual, for help in transcribing and proofreading.

The relationship between parent firms and their subsidiaries is a crucial aspect of corporate governance, and is increasingly complex in the global environment. We analyze an organizational arrangement quite common in Japan, the corporate spinoff, focusing on the relationship between parent firms in the Japanese service sector and their spinoff subsidiaries. The level of parental ownership is negatively related to the parent firm's net income and number of subsidiaries, but positively related to its advertising expenditures. In addition, parent firms tend to have lower ownership of more profitable subsidiaries. The ownership arrangement between the parent and the subsidiary appears to be based on issues broader than direct profit maximization.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mechanism of transmitting economic policy uncertainty (EPU) shocks to capital structure.

The authors adopt a novel approach that bridges the asset pricing implications of EPU and the debt-financing decisions of Chinese firms by introducing a variable “policy-risk-induced equity return” (PRER). PRER is the product of the EPU beta and the EPU shock. Differentiating firms as per the signs of the EPU beta helps to shed light on the deep questions of whether their respective leverage targets and speeds of adjustment are different and how the targets and speeds are determined.

The empirical evidence shows that it is the equity market that channels EPU shocks to capital structure through PRER in China. Firms with positive (negative) EPU betas have PRER impact negatively (positively) the leverage target, conforming to the market-timing theory. EPU and non-policy uncertainty shocks cause the speed of adjustment to change over time. Overall, the intertemporal relation between EPU and leverage is negative. These results are robust to alternative leverage measures and after controlling for non-policy uncertainty shocks and conventional firm characteristics and have implications for academic research, policymaking, market stability, and corporate financing.

This study is the first to probe for, and provide insights into, the underlying reason why EPU impacts capital structure by connecting asset pricing to corporate financing for a large sample of Chinese publicly traded firms.