Prospects for a European Animal Welfare Label from the German Perspective: Supply Chain Barriers

The Federal Government of Germany as well as the European Commission are discussing the establishment of an animal welfare label. This label should enable consumers to make a conscious purchasing decision on animal welfare products. Various studies show that many consumers (in Germany around 20 %) prefer products produced under animal friendly conditions. However, the supply of such products is limited. The following study examines the source of this discrepancy by way of an action‐based analytical approach and identifies different barriers within the supply chain that prevent the establishment of a market segment for animal welfare products. Although consumer demand will be decisive for long‐term success, first of all the stakeholders of the supply chain must be convinced. If the stakeholders are not prepared to participate in an animal welfare program the diffusion phase can take a very long time or even fail. This study presents such supply chain barriers and interprets them in the light of neoinstitutionalism.animal welfare, label, supply chain, neo‐institutionalism., Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty, Industrial Organization, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, Risk and Uncertainty,

Data Aggregation and Vertical Price Transmission: An Experiment with German Food Prices

The impact of cross sectional aggregation over individual retail stores on the estimation and testing of vertical price transmission between the wholesale and retail levels is investigated using a unique data set of individual retail prices in Germany. Systematic differences between the results of estimations using aggregated data on the one hand, and disaggregated data on the other, are discussed theoretically and confirmed empirically. The results suggest that estimation with aggregated data generates misleading conclusions about price transmission behavior at the level of the individual units (i.e. retail stores) that underlie these aggregates.Aggregation, Vertical Price Transmission, Food Prices, Germany, Demand and Price Analysis, Marketing, L11, D40,

THE IMPACT OF DATA AGGREGATION ON THE MEASUREMENT OF VERTICAL PRICE TRANSMISSION: EVIDENCE FROM GERMAN FOOD PRICES

The impact of cross sectional aggregation over individual retail stores on the estimation and testing of vertical price transmission is investigated using a unique data set of individual retail prices. Systematic differences between the results of estimations using aggregated data on the one hand, and disaggregated data on the other, are discussed theoretically and confirmed empirically. The results suggest that results based on aggregated data generally cannot be used to draw conclusions about price transmission behaviour at the level of the individual data that underlies aggregates.Demand and Price Analysis,

Lattice QCD calculation of hadronic light-by-light scattering

We perform a lattice QCD calculation of the hadronic light-by-light scattering amplitude in a broad kinematical range. At forward kinematics, the results are compared to a phenomenological analysis based on dispersive sum rules for light-by-light scattering. The size of the pion pole contribution is investigated for momenta of typical hadronic size. The presented numerical methods can be used to compute the hadronic light-by-light contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. Our calculations are carried out in two-flavor QCD with the pion mass in the range of 270 to 450MeV, and contain so far only the diagrams with fully connected quark lines.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure