The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

2 1 The innovative transport systems and the CityMobil project 10 1.1 The research questions 10 2 The state of art in the field of automatic transport systems 12 2.1 Case studies and demand studies for innovative transport systems 12 3 The design and implementation of surveys 14 3.1 Definition of experimental design 14 3.2 Questionnaire design and delivery 16 3.3 First analyses on the collected sample 18 4 Calibration of Logit Multionomial demand models 21 4.1 Methodology 21 4.2 Calibration of the “full” model. 22 4.3 Calibration of the “final” model 24 4.4 The demand analysis through the final Multinomial Logit model 25 5 The analysis of interaction between the demand and socioeconomic attributes 31 5.1 Methodology 31 5.2 Application of Mixed Logit models to the demand 31 5.3 Analysis of the interactions between demand and socioeconomic attributes through Mixed Logit models 32 5.4 Mixed Logit model and interaction between age and the demand for the CTS 38 5.5 Demand analysis with Mixed Logit model 39 6 Final analyses and conclusions 45 6.1 Comparison between the results of the analyses 45 6.2 Conclusions 48 6.3 Answers to the research questions and future developments 52

The European commission

In this book, Andrew Harvey sets out to provide a unified and comprehensive theory of structural time series models. Unlike the traditional ARIMA models, structural time series models consist explicitly of unobserved components, such as trends and seasonals, which have a direct interpretation. As a result the model selection methodology associated with structural models is much closer to econometric methodology. The link with econometrics is made even closer by the natural way in which the models can be extended to include explanatory variables and to cope with multivariate time series. From the technical point of view, state space models and the Kalman filter play a key role in the statistical treatment of structural time series models. The book includes a detailed treatment of the Kalman filter. This technique was originally developed in control engineering, but is becoming increasingly important in fields such as economics and operations research. This book is concerned primarily with modelling economic and social time series, and with addressing the special problems which the treatment of such series poses. The properties of the models and the methodological techniques used to select them are illustrated with various applications. These range from the modellling of trends and cycles in US macroeconomic time series to to an evaluation of the effects of seat belt legislation in the UK.

Forecasting, Structural Time Series Models and the Kalman Filter

The author systematically examines one of the important issues of information — establishing the market price. He introduces the concept of «search» — where a buyer wanting to get a better price, is forced to question sellers. The article deals with various aspects of finding the necessary information.

Economics of Information

We investigate conditions sufficient for identification of average treatment effects using instrumental variables. First we show that the existence of valid instruments is not sufficient to identify any meaningful average treatment effect. We then establish that the combination of an instrument and a condition on the relation between the instrument and the participation status is sufficient for identification of a local average treatment effect for those who can be induced to change their participation status by changing the value of the instrument. Finally we derive the probability limit of the standard IV estimator under these conditions. It is seen to be a weighted average of local average treatment effects.

Evolution and Rationality Some Recent Game-Theoretic Results. Identification and Estimation of Local Average Treatment Effects

A choice experiment model for beef: What US consumer responses tell us about relative preferences for food safety, country-of-origin labeling and traceability

Do fair trade and eco-labels in coffee wake up the consumer conscience?

Demand for value-added products is highly segmented among different types of consumers. In this paper, we assess consumer preferences for local, organic, and GMO-free potatoes in order to discover their potential niche markets. We identify socio-demographic characteristics that affect consumer preferences and compare the effects of different attributes on consumers' willingness to pay. Results suggest that the attribute "Colorado-Grown" carries a higher premium than organic and GMO-free attributes.

Discovering Niche Markets: A Comparison Of Consumer Willingness To Pay For A Local (Colorado Grown), Organic, And Gmo-Free Product

Demand for value-added products is highly segmented among different types of consumers. In this article, we assess consumer preferences for local, organic, and GMO-free potatoes in order to discover their potential niche markets. We identify sociodemographic characteristics that affect consumer preferences and compare the effects of different attributes on consumers' willingness to pay. Results suggest that the attribute “Colorado grown” carries a higher willingness to pay than organic and GMO-free attributes.

/pdf/discovering-niche-markets-a-comparison-of-consumer-1kzgu9rlv1.pdf

Discovering Niche Markets: A Comparison of Consumer Willingness to Pay for Local (Colorado Grown), Organic, and GMO-Free Products

We assess consumer choice of eco-labeled, organic, and regular apples, and identify sociodemographic characteristics affecting the choice among those three alternatives. Eco-labeled apples are less desirable than organic when food safety, the environment, and children's needs are considered. Characteristics that may be expected to positively affect the decision to buy eco-labeled apples relative to regular apples actually have the opposite effect with the inclusion of the organic alternative. When considering all three choices, the eco-labeled product is found to be an intermediate choice among consumers.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40987117.pdf

Maria L. Loureiro

Papers

A choice experiment model for beef: What US consumer responses tell us about relative preferences for food safety, country-of-origin labeling and traceability

Do fair trade and eco-labels in coffee wake up the consumer conscience?

Discovering Niche Markets: A Comparison Of Consumer Willingness To Pay For A Local (Colorado Grown), Organic, And Gmo-Free Product

Discovering Niche Markets: A Comparison of Consumer Willingness to Pay for Local (Colorado Grown), Organic, and GMO-Free Products

Assessing Consumer Preferences for Organic, Eco-labeled, and Regular Apples