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The aim of the paper is to investigate the effects of the corporate governance model on social and environmental disclosure (SED). We analyze the disclosures of the 100 U.S. Best Corporate Citizens in the period 2005—2007, and we posit a series of simultaneous relationships between different attributes of the governance system and a multidimensional construct of corporate social performance (CSP). We consider both the extent and the quality of SED, with the purpose of identifying increasing levels of corporate commitment to stakeholders and shedding some light on whether SED is used as a signal or rather as a legitimacy tool. Our empirical evidence shows that the stakeholders' orientation of corporate governance is positively associated with CSP and SED. On the other hand, we do not find support for the monitoring intensity of corporate governance being negatively associated with social performance. We also find that CSP in the \"product\" dimension is positively associated with the extent and quality of SED whilst CSP in the \"people\" dimension is negatively associated with the extent and quality of SED. At a time when shareholders and stakeholders share more common aspects in their relationships with firms, this is a significant area to explore and this research fills an important lacuna in this respect.

This paper estimates Taylor rules featuring instabilities in policy parameters and switches in policy shocks’ volatility for the post-World War II (WWII) U.S. economy. We contrast a rule embedding a fixed-inflation target with another featuring trend inflation, i.e., a time-varying inflation target. The rule embedding trend inflation turns out to be (a) empirically superior according to a marginal likelihood-based comparison and (b) more able to pin down some relevant episodes of the post-WWII U.S. monetary policy history. Estimates conducted with Greenbook data confirm the empirical superiority of the rule featuring a time-varying inflation target. A comparison with recently published estimates of trend inflation is also conducted.

In this paper we propose an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to estimate stochastic volatility models with jumps and affine structure. Our idea relies on the use of adaptive methods that aim at reducing the asymptotic variance of the estimates. We focus on the Delayed Rejection algorithm in order to find accurate proposals and to efficiently simulate the volatility path. Furthermore, Bayesian model selection is addressed through the use of reduced runs of the MCMC together with an auxiliary particle filter necessary to evaluate the likelihood function. An empirical application based on the study of the Dow Jones Composite 65 and of the FTSE 100 financial indexes is presented to study some empirical properties of the algorithm implemented.

The milk addiction paradox refers to an empirical finding in which commodities that are typically considered to be non addictive, such as milk, appear instead to be addictive. This result seems more likely when there is persistence in consumption and when using aggregate data, and it suggests that the AR(2) model typically used in the addiction literature is prone to produce spurious result in favor of rational addiction. Using both simulated and real data, we show that the milk addiction paradox disappears when estimating the data using an AR(1) linear specification that describes the saddle-path solution of the rational addiction model. The AR(1) specification is able to correctly discriminate between rational addiction and simple persistence in the data, to test for the main features of rational addiction, and to produce unbiased estimates of the short and long-run elasticity of demand. These results hold both with individual and aggregated data, and they suggest that, for testing rational addiction, the AR(1) model is a better empirical alternative than the canonical AR(2) model.

This paper estimates Taylor rules featuring instabilities in policy parameters, switches in policy shocks' volatility, and time-varying trend inflation using post-WWII U.S. data. The model embedding the stochastic target performs better in terms of data-fit and identification of the changes in the FOMC's chairmanships. Policy breaks are found not to be synchronized with variations in policy shocks' volatilities. Finally, we detect a negative correlation between systematic monetary policy aggressiveness and inflation gap persistence.

This paper estimates regime-switching monetary policy rules featuring trend inflation using post-WWII US data. We find evidence in favour of regime shifts and time-variation of the inflation target. We also find a drop in the inflation gap persistence when entering the Great Moderation sample. Estimated Taylor rule parameters and regimes are robust across different monetary policy models. We propose an 'internal consistency' test to discriminate among our estimated rules. Such a test relies upon a feedback mechanism running from the monetary policy stance to the inflation gap. Our results support the stochastic autoregressive process as the most consistent model for trend inflation, above all when conditioning to the post-1985 subsample.

This Paper analyses the relationship between different equity rules and the incentives to sign and ratify a climate agreement. A widespread conjecture suggests that a more equitable distribution of the burden of reducing emissions would enhance the incentives for more countries - particularly big emitters - to accept an emission reduction scheme defined within an international climate agreement. This Paper shows that this conjecture is only partly supported by the empirical evidence that can be derived from the recent outcomes of climate negotiations. Even though an equitable sharing of the costs of controlling GHG emissions can provide better incentives to sign and ratify a climate agreement than the burden sharing implicit in the Kyoto agreement, a stable global agreement cannot be achieved. A possible strategy to achieve a global agreement without free-riding incentives is a policy mix in which global emission trading is coupled with a transfer mechanism designed to offset incentives to free ride.

A growing body of literature shows that full-cooperation among farmers to manage productive ecosystem services would yield gains with respect to uncoordinated approaches. The public good feature of these ecosystem services may, however, hinder the emergence of a cooperative solution at the landscape scale. In this paper, we introduce in a coalition formation game a spatially-explicit bioeconomic model of fruit pollination, where pollinaton depends on the distance to the choosen location of natural habitats. We analyse: (i) which coalitions are stable; (ii) what benefits they provide; (iii) how cooperation depends on the initial landscape structure; and (iv) how policy instruments affect cooperation. The theoretical model presents the rationality of cooperation but, due to the detailed heterogeneity and complex spatial interactions among farms, we use a numerical example to determine the stable coalitions. We find that only small coalitions are stable and that the benefits of cooperation decrease when the spatial autocorrelation of fruit tree covers increase. Policy instruments can increase the interest for cooperation but per-hectare payments and minimum participation rules may reduce the habitat area at the margin (by decreasing the stability of coalitions). Price premium for the coalition members increase the habitat area but its budget-effectiveness decreases as the spatial autocorrelation of fruit tree covers increase.

Hypoxia, which characterizes most tumor tissues, can alter the function of different immune cell types, favoring tumor escape mechanisms. In this study, we show that hypoxia profoundly acts on NK cells by influencing their transcriptome, affecting their immunoregulatory functions, and changing the chemotactic responses of different NK cell subsets. Exposure of human peripheral blood NK cells to hypoxia for 16 or 96 h caused significant changes in the expression of 729 or 1,100 genes, respectively. Gene Set Enrichment Analysis demonstrated that these changes followed a consensus hypoxia transcriptional profile. As assessed by Gene Ontology annotation, hypoxia-targeted genes were implicated in several biological processes: metabolism, cell cycle, differentiation, apoptosis, cell stress, and cytoskeleton organization. The hypoxic transcriptome also showed changes in genes with immunological relevance including those coding for proinflammatory cytokines, chemokines, and chemokine-receptors. Quantitative RT-PCR analysis confirmed the modulation of several immune-related genes, prompting further immunophenotypic and functional studies. Multiplex ELISA demonstrated that hypoxia could variably reduce NK cell ability to release IFNγ, TNFα, GM-CSF, CCL3, and CCL5 following PMA+Ionomycin or IL15+IL18 stimulation, while it poorly affected the response to IL12+IL18. Cytofluorimetric analysis showed that hypoxia could influence NK chemokine receptor pattern by sustaining the expression of CCR7 and CXCR4. Remarkably, this effect occurred selectively (CCR7) or preferentially (CXCR4) on CD56 NK cells, which indeed showed higher chemotaxis to CCL19, CCL21, or CXCL12. Collectively, our data suggest that the hypoxic environment may profoundly influence the nature of the NK cell infiltrate and its effects on immune-mediated responses within tumor tissues.

An increasing number of papers analyse the inclusion of collective/spatial conditionality constraints in agricultural policies dealing with natural resource management. In this article we theoretically assess the conditions in which employing collective conditionality constraints linked to incentives better reach the social preferences on PG provision by agriculture. We deal with this issue by using a coalition formation model to endogenize the size of the group of farmers cooperating, and investigate how it is affected by different policy schemes. We analyse and compare the following policy schemes: (1) a homogenous payment that target the whole population of farmers, (2) a coalition bonus, that incentivizes only the contributions by the coalition members, and (3) a coalition bonus associated to a MPR on the size of the coalition. The results show that formulating payments that discriminate between co-operators and free-riders, and associating to such a payment a MPR, is relatively more effective than the traditional homogenous payments. However this is true only under some (local) conditions that we theoretically derived.