EMINENT PAPER SERIES — WHY DO INVENTORIES RISE WHEN DEMAND FALLS IN HOUSING AND OTHER MARKETS?

Inventories and price changes are correlated. The inverse relation is most obvious in housing where inventories build in low-demand markets and shrink in high-demand markets. This is a puzzle. Symmetry of information among buyers and sellers would seem to imply that sellers would change their reservation value by the amount that buyers change their offers. Because there is heterogeneity among buyers in the valuation of a given house, sellers set prices strategically. When demand falls, sellers rationally lower their prices, but not by enough to keep the probability of sale constant. As a result, inventories grow.

Will CDM Still be Effective after Kyoto Protocol? - Two Dilemmas in the Mechanism

Clean Development Mechanism is one of the Climate Mitigation tools with the purposes to reduce GHGs. We resemble the one-shot public-goods game to deduce the constraints for CDM’s long-term effectiveness. By studying PDDs of China’s registered programs, we find the effect of technology transfer is not obvious. The dilemma between CDM’s additionality and host countries’ environment policies, as well as the dilemma between CDM as public good and technology as private good can account for the uncertainty about CDM after the expiring of Kyoto Protocols. Our analysis shows with the development of Carbon Finance of the host countries and the symmetry of information between each participant have a positive affect on the effectiveness of CDM.

La comunicazione e l'etichettatura degli alimenti nella disciplina della sicurezza alimentare

- The current market is governed by an information system, but it is also regulated by interests specific to the discipline of food safety. Therefore, it highlights the close bond between the contents of the contract and the contents of the information, as well as the equally tight correlation between information and competition. In fact, the legislator aims to reconcile the need for food safety with that for the circulation of goods. It must also be added that food safety is a discipline, first and foremost, concerned with product marketing, and thus the rules on information provided for by the common legislator are instrumental to the achievement of a common market of safe and healthy foods, a market governed by rules of communication that facilitate exchanges and guarantee the circulation of foods. From this perspective, within the discipline of food safety information has a double aim, as it strives to provide the market with that symmetry of information essential to its functioning while safeguarding the interests of food safety. Hence, we can understand the legal weight, within the food market, of labels, which can be seen as both the "space" in which communication takes place and a vehicle for information. It is in this context that the food labelling law, eventually regulated by directive 2000/13, originates and develops. However, the legal function of labels cannot be regarded exclusively as a tool for the satisfaction of the need to inform and safeguard consumers and facilitate exchanges between member states, but it should exist in a framework that encompasses the whole food safety legal sys158 tem (reg. 178/2002). The general rules governing the food safety system are thus revealed, as well as the indications, compulsory and non, to be placed on the labels, both with regard to their content and the way this information is conveyed. In this context, we can see the relevance of the very recent reg. 1924/2006 of December 20th 2006 on the nutritional values of foods and their effects on health. Key words: food security, comunication, labelling, consumer protection.