Changes in exchange rates have become a prominent issue in Germany and Japan - due to the enormous appreciation of the Deutschmark and the Yen. Conventional wisdom suggests that economic activity will be negatively affected if a currency is going through a phase of appreciation. The paper...

The literature on food security has mainly been focused on causes, effects, and/or the nature of the crisis. However, there have been only a few attempts to understand how the discourse on the subject matter was shaped and is still being shaped at present. Food security is at the intersection of...

If a product has two dimensions of quality, one observable and one not, a firm can use observable quality as a signal of unobservable quality. The correlation between consumers' valuation of high quality in each dimension is a key determinant of the feasibility of such signaling. A firm may use...

As consumer demand for organic food grows, organic certification is increasingly promoted in many developing countries. Organic products earn a premium price on the market compared to conventional varieties. Hence, organic production is often seen as a valuable alternative for developing...

As consumers’ demand for organic products and especially organic food grows, organic certification for tropical fruit is increasingly promoted in many developing countries. Certified organic pineapple exports only started taking off after 2005 and are rapidly increasing. The organic and...

Companies with market power occasionally engage in intentional quality reduction of a portion of their output as a means of offering two qualities of goods for the purpose of price discrimination, even absent a cost saving. This paper provides an exact characterization in terms of marginal...

The authors examine the timing and quality of product introduction in an R&D stopping game, where they allow for horizontal and vertical differentiation in the product market. They observe that discontinuous changes in introduction dates can occur as firms' abilities as researchers change....

We explore whether the introduction of trust based working hours is related to the subsequent innovation performance of firms. Employing a panel data set of over 5,000 German establishments, we implement a propensity score matching approach where we only consider firms that did not use trust...