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ABSTRACT:  This paper provides a comparative assessment of the organization of urban waste management in selected European countries and discusses the regulatory implications of the ongoing evolution. Using an institutional economic approach, focused on governance of transactions along the value chain, we argue that: i) there is evidence of an increasing shift towards operator‐based integrated systems; ii) the emphasis put on material and energy recovery opens the market far beyond the traditional legal monopolies established for managing urban services. These results pose new challenges for economic regulation and make it more complicate to trace the boundary between the public service and the market domain. Spaces for competition in the market have become much larger, but the role of public regulation and planning are nonetheless more far‐reaching than in the past.

This work explores the effects of production offshoring on the workforce skill composition of manufacturing firms. Its aim is to assess if the firms' strategy to offshore production activities determines a bias in the in-house employment of labor in favour of high-skilled workers. Using three repeated cross-sections of firm-level data over the period 1995-2003, we employ a nonparametric analysis based on propensity score matching thanks to which we can control for selectivity bias without relying on a specific functional form of the relations of interest. We test the effect of production offshoring on the workforce skill composition of manufacturing firms by employing different measures of skills by occupational title. Our results point to a weak, but down-skilling, impact of delocalization on the labor composition of Italian manufacturing: in particular, we find that firms that farmed out production activities in 1998-2000 generally employ a lower share of skilled, non manual, workers with respect to the counterfactual of nondelocalizing firms. These results seem to be in line with an idea of defensive offshoring. However, despite the usual findings that mainly stress the negative impact of delocalization on low-skilled workers, we find here that middle-managers category is the most affected. Such evidence may find a twofold explanation: on the one hand, skilled workers can decline more than unskilled workers because of a substitution effect that is driven by the will of reducing not only redundant activities, but also intermediate skills-intensive activities as control and coordination for which middlemanagers are employed for. On the other hand, skilled workers may decline in absolute terms, because of a quantity effect that occurs when firms decide to transfer managerial staff in order to coordinate and supervise the activities shifted abroad.

El monopolio por sí mismo no se encuentra prohibido. Aquello que es perseguido y sancionado por la ley es el abuso que puedan realizar los agentes económicos que detentan una posición de dominio en el mercado

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Meat grown in labs, also known as cultured meat, is currently under development and will likely soon be available on supermarket shelves. Such new meat-based products may tackle some of the most controversial societal concerns related to the industry, in particular animal wellbeing and environmental impacts, with further potential improvements concerning food security. However, due to its high degree of novelty, it remains unclear how consumers view this type of food product, particularly in terms of beliefs regarding its intrinsic attributes such as safety, nutrients and flavor characterization, and its positive externalities concerning the environment, animal welfare, and food security. The present study aims at unveiling the perception, acceptance, and willingness to try, buy, and pay a premium price for cultured meat in the Italian context, deconvoluting the effect of providing positive information to consumers. Such investigation offers new insights for the development of targeted marketing strategies by deepening the understanding of consumers' perception of this lab-grown food product. Indeed, the study reveals that positive information affects the consumers' perception towards safety and nutritional characteristics of cultured meat and the willingness to pay a premium price for this new food product accordingly. ABSTRACT: The global meat production system is currently under pressure, particularly for its environmental and animal wellbeing impacts, as well as for the increasing protein demand worldwide. In this regard, cultured meat is currently a hot topic in the industrial, political, and societal arenas, revealing itself as the potential relief for the issues above. However, its high degree of novelty may hamper the extent of consumers' acceptance. This research assesses for which beliefs concerning intrinsic attributes and positive externalities, the provision of information is a sufficient tool for affecting the perception and acceptance of cultured meat on a panel of Italian ...