The paper aims at analyzing the effect of institutional quality on labor productivity in the agricultural sector. To meet this aim, a Gaussian log-linear model was applied to 773 vineyard farms, located in 71 Italian provinces. The applied methodology enabled to quantify the overall impact of...

Over the last decades, economic, social, and environmental changes have profoundly affected citizen-consumer's lifestyle and food habits. Current food habits encourage people either to eat more outside home or to a massive use of convenience foods. The consequence is the increasing rate of...

This special issue of Agricultural and Food Economics consists of four articles that were part of the scientific programme of the First SIDEA-SIEA Joint Conference, held in Bisceglie in September 2017. The conference afforded agricultural economists the opportunity to reflect on cooperative...

This paper investigates whether size and speed of the pass-through of market rates into short term business lending rates have increased in the wake of the introduction of the euro. Allowing for multiple unknown structural breaks we find two in four EMU countries, and in the UK as well, and a...

The harmonized MIR retail interest rates for the euro area, available as of January 2003, show remarkable differences both in levels and dynamics with the previous unharmonized NRIR rates. This evidence should suggest caution in extrapolating the findings of the NRIR-based literature on the...

A new approach is proposed for searching multiple unknown breaks, possibly associated with EMU, in the short term business lending rate pass-through. Multiple breaks are detected in five out of nine countries of the euro area. The last break occurs much before the start of EMU for France,...

In light of the problems that characterize the modern agri-business in the definition of competitive strategies, based on internal, tangible and intangible resources, it becomes necessary to pay attention to business networks, or inter-company relations aimed at commercial transactions, exchange...

In recent years a number of ongoing social, economical and institutional changes have progressively led, on the one hand, to the emergence of intricate competitive scenarios, and, on the other, to a more extensive role of the food industry in modern society. Two fundamental issues – the...

In the first detailed study of the trade debt own cost for the Italian manufacturing firms it is shown that, comparing also self-defined bank lending rationed and non rationed firms, interfirm credit received is, if ever, only slightly more expensive than bank credit. Besides establishing the...

The paper focuses on a new theoretical-methodological approach to interpreting functional transformation processes of farms located in rural areas and marked by a delay in development. We have defined a theoretical paradigm of value portfolio (VP) which considers -in a new light- multifunctional...