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The purpose of this paper is to study an innovative rice value chain financing system (VCFS) established in Benin, to identify the determinants of producers and processors access to formal credit, both at intensive and extensive margins. It focuses on multi-stakeholder platforms (MSP) which connect producers and processors in need of credit to potential financial lenders.

The empirical analysis uses rich cross-sectional survey data collected in Northern Benin in 2018. The sample consists of 215 rice producers and 217 rice processors randomly selected through a multi-stage sampling and interviewed with structured questionnaires. The empirical models analyze the determinants of the likelihood to receive a credit and the amount of credit received. To account for the sample selection and censored nature of the main outcome variable, the study considers a Heckman two-stage model coupled with a Tobit model for robustness checks.

The study finds that the MSP are effective in increasing access to formal credit and the amount borrowed. Producers and processors who are members of the MSP are more likely to receive credit and, conditional on being approved for credit borrower, a larger amount. Other key factors that significantly explain access to credit include the use of soft guarantee for securing a loan, the degree of participation in the platform and demographic characteristics. These findings are consistent across the Heckman and Tobit models.

The study attempts to rigorously analyze the factors explaining producers and processors access to credit using cross-sectional survey data. But it has some limitations. The main limitation is the type of data used. Ideally, one would like to run a randomized control trial (RCT) to randomly assign participation in the MSP to causally estimate its impact of access to credit. The second-best option would be to have a panel data covering the period before and after the establishment of the platform. However, in the absence of an RCT or panel data, the study resorts to cross-sectional data and empirical models that account for sample selection bias and the censored nature of the credit received.

One of the key findings of the study is that participation in the MSP (through different value chain stages associations) increases access to formal credit. This highlights an important and effective mechanism, a well-coordinated value chains that integrated lenders, that policymakers can leverage to facilitate access to credit in the agricultural sector.

Access to credit is important to boost agricultural productivity and income. Hence, the findings of the study have social implications in terms of poverty reduction in rural areas.

The study contributes to earlier theories and empirical studies on the demand for credit. It focuses on an innovative VCFS, increasingly adopted in many developing countries, adds originality and value to the understanding of mechanisms to unlock agricultural actors’ access to credit in low-income countries.

The purpose of this paper is to seek a clearer understanding of how firms involved in power intensive industries participate in foreign direct investment. The paper asks the following questions: how skilled are the employees available for hire? What kind of pollution restrictions will be applied to the plant? Is the infrastructure in place to enable free transport of the necessary materials? All of these are factors that can be analyzed on a national level, and are major factors in government policy.

The research is designated to explain how macro policy can be directed towards firms in the power intensive industry, to impact the competitiveness within the industry. Skilled labor differences is reflecting governmental policy in its willingness to contribute to education. Infrastructure can be viewed as an indicator for long‐term policy planning by the government. The pollution variable reflects on macro policy emphasis by governments, by presenting their emission targets. Investment cost variable gives indication of government policy concerning the ease with which foreign investors can enter into and invest in a particular country. The case country is Iceland, an isolated island that is unable to export its abundance directly and therefore must do so through foreign direct investment.

The findings indicate that source countries are attracted by the level of skill in Iceland at the beginning stage of operations when faced with fixed threshold cost. Once the plants have overcome fixed costs, there are positive impacts on marginal investment, the more skilled the source country is compared to the host. Other factors that proved to be important in this case study are distance, infrastructure, government stability, pollution quotas, and the fishing resource.

The relative friendliness a country's policies display towards an industry can make a huge difference when it comes to how successful a business can be, so studying these national‐level policies can help an individual determine what kind of direction to take on the day‐to‐day operational decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether and how the extent of religion in a firm’s social environment affects corporate innovation and innovation efficiency from the perspectives of religion-related risk aversion and religion-based social norms.

Using a sample of 8,601 Chinese firm-year observations from 2007 to 2012, this paper examines the relationship between religion and innovation intensity, as well as innovation efficiency. A battery of checks, that is, adopting Heckman selection model, using a province-level measure of religiosity and an alternative measure of innovation intensity, and taking the stochastic frontier analysis method to capture corporate innovation efficiency, are conducted to alleviate the concern of self-selection and to guarantee the robustness of the findings of this paper.

This paper finds strong evidence that firms registered in more religious regions, that is, regions with more Buddhist monasteries within a certain radius, undertake fewer innovation activities as measured by the ratio of R&D investment over total sales income but achieve higher innovation efficiency reflected by the value-relevance of R&D investment.

This paper complements the existing literature by suggesting that religion can serve as an informal social mechanism and performs a “less is more” effect in disciplining corporate innovation activities.

As a coastal emerging country, export-led marine economy has been the development model of Vietnam over the past decades since The Renovation 1986. Given the rise of globalization, regional economic integration and logistics enhancement have been identified as key engines for economic sustainability by Vietnamese government. Nevertheless, little sectoral and sub-sectoral evidence has been given for the platform shaped by policies relevant to export, logistics performance and regional economic integration. The paper employs the trade gravity model to study the relationship between seafood export, logistics performance and regional economic integration in the case of Vietnam. Sectoral and sub-sectoral trade gravity models are employed. Logistics performance from the exporter-side and importer-side is included in the estimations. Membership to effective regional trade agreements of Vietnam are proxies for regional economic integration. Zero trade issue is resolved by the Pooled Ordinary Least Squares (POLS), Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood (PPML) and Heckman Sample Selection estimations, while endogeneity is tackled by the difference and system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) models. Findings vary by estimation methods, data levels, product groups, and whether which side is considered. In addition, theoretical contributions and some seafood export-driving policy recommendations relevant to regional economic integration and logistics performance development are discussed.

This study aims to examine the impact of signaling through social media (SM) on funding achieved by start-ups.

This study follows a causal research design and is based on unique data set compiled from Crunchbase-Pro and Twitter. The sample size is 1,672 Indian start-ups. Heckman’s model and ordinary least squares regression is used to test the hypothesis.

Devising a thoughtful SM strategy, should be an integral part of the overall strategy of the start-ups looking out for funds. LinkedIn presence is in itself a positive signal. Active usage of Twitter and feedback from other Twitter users has a positive impact on funds raised by the start-up. Posting retweets and repetitive usage of URLs and media is not a predictor of funds raised by the start-up.

An early-stage strategy on SM adoption, especially Twitter can play an important role in attracting interest and attention of stakeholders. To capitalize SM, entrepreneurs should maintain an active SM account of the start-up.

India has emerged as one of the start-up hubs of the world. However, there is a dearth of literature on SM usage by start-ups in India. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is first of its kind and establishes the results empirically based on more than 100k tweets for a large pool of Indian start-ups.

The purpose of this paper is to examine urban households’ willingness to pay (WTP) for milk safety and to analyze the factors affecting WTP premiums using data obtained from surveys conducted in Samsun and Trabzon provinces, Turkey.

Contingent valuation and censoring methods including the error-dependent bivariate Heckman SS model were used for estimating WTP for milk safety and its effective factors, respectively.

The study indicates that 68 percent of the households were willing to pay 0.35 per liter for improving the safety of milk. The model results show that satisfaction with food safety standards, being married and full-time employment have statistically significant positive effects on the WTP for ISO-certified milk. However, purchasing milk from farmers or open-air markets, age, having a child six-year old or younger, and high school or higher education have statistically significant negative effects on the WTP for ISO-certified milk.

The main limitation of the current study is that only urban consumers’ WTP and effective factors for milk safety were examined in two provinces of Turkey.

More rigorous implementations of food safety standards, traceability systems and effective educational campaigns could promote households’ food safety awareness and increase their demand for milk safety.

Knowing what factors are involved in consumer WTP is extremely important for decision makers to create new social policies in the region or country.

A similar study has not been conducted in Turkey. The novelty of this study is the specification and robust estimation of three different but competing models to reveal the wide range of WTP amounts for safe milk.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impacts of differences in sanitary and phytosanitary measures as non-tariff measures (NTMs) in the tea trade between importing and exporting countries. With the progress of trade liberalization, there has been a shift of focus to NTMs as alternative or potential trade barriers.

In order to quantify an NTM on tea trade and implement its empirical application, this study designed an index of differences in maximum residue levels (MRLs) for the pesticide endosulfan and introduced it into a gravity trade model. The estimation challenges in the presence of heteroscedasticity and many zero-trade flows are resolved by taking the Heckman and Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood estimators.

This study found that differences in MRLs, arising from the stricter standards in importing countries lead to a significant decrease in tea trade value. This negative impact of differences in MRLs is found to be slightly less than that of tariffs, implying that in this case, the NTM acts as a policy substitute for import tariffs in the global tea trade.

The main contribution of this study is to suggest and quantify the differences in MRLs across countries as a substantial NTM on the global tea trade and provide its empirical application.

This paper aims to ascertain stakeholder’s willingness to contribute towards food banking implementation and further develops a framework for implementing food banks in developing country, Ghana.

Structured questionnaire was used to obtain response from 385 respondents using multistage sampling technique. Descriptive statistics was used to determine frameworks for food banking, whereas Heckman two-stage regression was used to analyse factors influencing stakeholder’s willingness to contribute towards food banking.

The results revealed that respondents preferred food banking with pantry, which is similar to the American model. Respondents were willing to contribute a minimum of (GH₵1–200, US$ ¢ 0.17-34.12) cedis and a maximum of GH₵ (400–600, US$ 68.23-102.35) monthly towards food bank implementation. Age, marital status and household head had a negative influence on stakeholders’ willingness to contribute towards food banking implementation, whereas income level and food bank awareness influenced willingness to contribute towards food bank implementation positively.

The study gives insight on stakeholder’s willingness to contribute towards food banking via cash or kind and further develops a framework for implementing food banking in Ghana.

This study provides empirical contributions and vital information about stakeholders preferred food banking models and framework for implementing food banking, which Government can use as a social intervention policy to help vulnerable Ghanaians. In addition, findings from the study can enlighten and guide non-governmental organizations, individual philanthropists and other corporate bodies who want to contribute to food security, food poverty, hunger alleviation and development through food banking implementation.

In a developing country such as Ghana where there remains a paucity of food banking research, this study adds to existing literature by providing vital information of stakeholders preferred food banking models and frameworks for implementing food banking.

This paper aims to investigate the effect of cooperative societies on household food security in six villages of Northern Ethiopia. Cooperative societies have significant contribution to the food security and poverty reduction. However, limited empirical studies exist in the study areas about the roles of cooperative societies on food security.

Primary cross-sectional data were collected from randomly selected 400 households. The study also gathered secondary data from the cooperative associations and government offices for comparison purposes. The paper applied Heckman two-stage model to capture the effect of cooperative societies on household food security.

The probability of the households to join cooperative societies and also ensure food security depends on various determining factors like institutional factors, demographic variables and rural functions. The paired sample t-test shows that the mean income and expenditure of the cooperative member households were 70 and 40 per cent higher in 2010 and 2011, respectively, than in the baseline. The two-sample independent t-test indicates that the mean income and expenditure of the member households were 47 and 32 per cent higher than the counterpart households. The Heckman model explains that cooperative societies have statistically significant, positive and robust effects on household food security at 1 per cent level.

A few variables might suffer from endogeneity problem, although theoretically insignificant and have no sound justification. The study also considers only two indicators of food security (income and expenditure), but the findings of the study would have been good and sound with several and composite food security index.

Such impact studies on cooperative societies are limited in the study areas. Thus, this study helps decision-makers, cooperative analysts and other concerned bodies to give priority for cooperative societies so as to curtail the food insecurity problem. It can also make meaningful contributions to bridge the gap in the cooperative literature.

The present study can improve the understanding of cooperative societies in the country. The finding of this paper can serve as an input for university students, decision-makers and cooperative analysts. The result can also strengthen the economic justification for policy intervention on cooperative societies.

Most studies in the areas address the financial performance, historical movement and opportunities and challenges of cooperative societies. This implies that more work is necessary to obtain a clear picture and broad spectrum about cooperative societies, and thus, this study addresses the effect of cooperative societies on household food security.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of property sale probability and sale price at auction in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

A two-stage Heckman sample selection model is used for this research. The first stage involves the estimation of a probit model on a successful sale. The second stage introduces an additional selection variable, the inverse Mills ratio, as an explanatory variable to the sale price estimation equation.

The authors find that Chinese-owned auctioned properties have higher sale probability and are sold at higher prices as compared to Indian and Malay-auctioned properties. Properties auctioned by the largest auction house outperformed other smaller auctioneers. Auction characteristics such as proximity to the city center, number of previous auction attempts and number of online viewers are positively related to sale price and sale probability.

The findings on the substantially lower sale price obtained by Malay and Indian borrowers compared to their Chinese counterparts imply that it is much harder for these borrowers to be relieved from financial distress. The two plausible explanations offered in this paper for this price differential, i.e. racial residential segregation and ownership restriction, warrant further study.

First, the authors consider the explanatory power of seller ethnicity, number of online viewers and auctioning route which are new to the literature. Second, they use a Heckman model that addresses possible selection bias of sold properties. This methodology is unexplored in the auction literature.