In an experiment on Airbnb, we find that applications from guests with distinctively African-American names are 16% less likely to be accepted relative to identical guests with distinctively White names. Discrimination occurs among landlords of all sizes, including small landlords sharing the property and larger landlords with multiple properties. It is most pronounced among hosts who have never had an African-American guest, suggesting only a subset of hosts discriminate. While rental markets have achieved significant reductions in discrimination in recent decades, our results suggest that Airbnb’s current design choices facilitate discrimination and raise the possibility of erasing some of these civil rights gains.

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Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Since the inception of competitive power markets two decades ago, electricity price forecasting (EPF) has gradually become a fundamental process for energy companies' decision making mechanisms. Over the years, the bulk of research has concerned point predictions. However, the recent introduction of smart grids and renewable integration requirements has had the effect of increasing the uncertainty of future supply, demand and prices. Academics and practitioners alike have come to understand that probabilistic electricity price (and load) forecasting is now more important for energy systems planning and operations than ever before. With this paper we offer a tutorial review of probabilistic EPF and present much needed guidelines for the rigorous use of methods, measures and tests, in line with the paradigm of 'maximizing sharpness subject to reliability'. The paper can be treated as an update and a further extension of the otherwise comprehensive EPF review of Weron (2014, IJF) or as a standalone treatment of a fascinating and underdeveloped topic, that has a much broader reach than EPF itself.

Recent advances in electricity price forecasting: A review of probabilistic forecasting

Agriculture, the Countryside and Land Use: An Economic Critique

Renewable energy consumption in economic sectors in the EU-27. The impact on economics, environment and conventional energy sources. A 20-year perspective

Many stylized facts about women in agriculture have been repeated for decades. Did nothing really change? Is some of this conventional wisdom simply maintained over time, or has it always been inaccurate? We use four rounds of cross-sectional data from Ghana to assess some of the facts and to evaluate whether gender patterns have changed over time. We focus on five main themes: land, cropping patterns, market participation, agricultural inputs, and employment. We add to the literature by showing new facts and evidence for more than 20 years. Results show that stylized facts do not always hold, and that some of these facts change over time. We find significant variation in the extent of (changes in) gender discrepancies across themes, different agroecological zones, ethnicities, household types and women s role in the household. Acknowledgement : We thank the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Funding for their support for this study under the Ghana Strategic Support Program. We are appreciative to the VLIR-UOS scholarship program to provide a research visit grant to Laura Pelleriaux, and we are especially thankful to Miet Maertens from the Division of Bioeconomics of KU Leuven, Belgium, for facilitating the early stages of the research. This work is undertaken as part of the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

Changing gender roles in agriculture? Evidence from 20 years of data in Ghana

Covid-19 pandemic provided many negative effects on world economies and people around the world. The covid-19 creates many threats to sustainability of agriculture sector which is very sensitive be...

Negative effects of covid-19 pandemic on agriculture: systematic literature review in the frameworks of vulnerability, resilience and risks involved

Young farmers’ support under the Common Agricultural Policy and sustainability of rural regions: Evidence from Lithuania

DOI: 10.14254/2071789X.2018/11-3/19 ABSTRACT. The concept of resilience has wide acceptance in different scientific doctrines and fields, from ecology to disaster management. Nowadays this phenomenon is being more and more intensively exploited in economic sciences in an attempt to measure the ability of economic systems to quickly regenerate from different external shocks or even to avoid them as such. This research paper examines economic resilience of the agricultural sector (including industries) with the example of Lithuanian empirical data. In order to measure the economic resilience of the agricultural sector, the appropriate index was created including a new derivative indicator – volatility of revenues from the desired growth path. Expert interviews, statistical analysis and econometrical modelling were employed in our research. The results show the increasing value of economic resilience of the Lithuanian agricultural sector up to the year 2015, which can be attributed to the accession into the EU, after this year inclination towards more profitable, but considerably more risky export markets lowers the calculated parameter of economic resilience of the Lithuanian agricultural sector. Such a tendency questions the sustainability of economic resilience of the Lithuanian agricultural sector.

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How Resistant is the Agricultural Sector? Economic Resilience Exploited

The effects of globalization have often been adverse for the agricultural sector, especially its most vulnerable element—the small farm. The importance of the agricultural sector as a whole and small farms in the sense of ensuring food security, employment and viability of rural areas, implies a necessity to support the sector and small farms in particular. For this purpose, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union (EU) seeks to boost the sustainability of agriculture in multiple dimensions. The 2013 reform of the CAP has provided a particularly strong impetus towards this direction. This paper establishes an indicator system to quantify the effects of the CAP direct payments on the socioeconomic sustainability of small farms. Expert survey and multi-criteria assessment are used to this end. The Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method is applied for the multi-criteria analysis. Lithuania is taken as a case study. The results show that, in the case of Lithuania, the direct payment system did not contribute to the improvement in socioeconomic sustainability of small farms up until 2013 CAP reform when its impact became undeniable.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/7/2112/pdf

Artiom Volkov

Papers

Negative effects of covid-19 pandemic on agriculture: systematic literature review in the frameworks of vulnerability, resilience and risks involved

Young farmers’ support under the Common Agricultural Policy and sustainability of rural regions: Evidence from Lithuania

How Resistant is the Agricultural Sector? Economic Resilience Exploited

Who Benefits from CAP? The Way the Direct Payments System Impacts Socioeconomic Sustainability of Small Farms

Are women neglected in the EU agriculture? Evidence from Lithuanian young farmers.