Mario Veneziani

Consumer willingness to pay for food safety: the case of mycotoxins in milk

European statistics show that one of the most widespread source of health risks related to food is mycotoxins. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the Italian consumers’ perception of the mycotoxins’ risk and, more specifically, their willingness-to-pay (WTP) for a hypothetical bottle of milk obtained by cows in which the feed ration contains maize certified for the ‘good practices’ that reduce such risk. For this purpose, a web-based stated choice (SC) experiment involving a representative sample of 973 Italian consumers has been carried out and WTP has been measured using the panel data version of a Random Parameters Logit (RPL) model. The results show that Italian consumers are willing to pay a rather high average price premium for “reduced-micotoxin” milk. This premium becomes even higher for female, middle-age and low-education consumers.

The capitalization of area payments into land rental prices: a panel sample selection approach

Previous empirical literature suggests that agricultural subsidies are capitalized into farmland rents and that the introduction of the 2003 decoupling reform of the EU Common Agricultural Policy, attaching the subsidy to land only, might have even extended the phenomenon of capitalization. Employing the FADN dataset for Italy we investigate this issue using methodologies accounting for selectivity, endogeneity and individual heterogeneity simultaneously. The evidence suggests that selectivity bias causes inconsistent estimation of parameters and wrong inference. Results reveal instead that, in Italy, there is no incidence of both coupled and decoupled payments.

Agglomeration Economies and Entrepreneurship in Italy and in Emilia Romagna Region: Empirical Evidences in the Manufacturing Industries

Entrepreneurship is among the most important elements for the evaluation of the local territorial development and it is certainly a meaningful indicator to understand interregional differences in economic development. Traditional explanations of entrepreneurship rely on evaluating the role of characteristics of the macro environment (profitability, labor market) as well as of the micro environment (composition of local industries). In this work an attempt is made to study this second element, deriving from the literature three hypothesis concerning the linkage between agglomeration economies and local entrepreneurship. The three hypothesis are tested applying an empirical model of entrepreneurial choice and using provincial and industrial data, for the Emilia Romagna region and for Italy. The aim is to characterize the industrial environment of Emilia Romagna region, to explain the superior performance of this region, compared to the others of Italy. Results indicate that, differently from the remainder of Italy, provinces in Emilia Romagna benefit from a greater industrial diversification, which definitively stimulates new firms formation.