This study analyses the impacts of environmental amenities associated with agricultural and silvicultural land use on the price of rural tourism accommodation in Asturias (Spain). A hedonic price model that relates the price of rural accommodation to environmental amenities as well as equipment, services offered, and the locational characteristics of the accommodation is estimated. The rural accommodations in the study are the self-catering cottages, the intrinsic features of which promote the development of rural tourism sustainability. Geographic information systems (GIS) data are used to measure the location and the proximity to amenities of these self-catering cottages. The main results indicate that agricultural land use has an important impact on the price of accommodation in self-catering cottages. Specifically, a high percentage of grassland in the municipality where the self-catering cottage is sited has a positive effect on rental prices, while a high percentage of arable crops has the opposite effect. The analysis is interesting for decision-making in the context of environmental policies, land use conflict resolution, and rural tourism sustainability.
The current economic crisis fuels the financial social responsibility after an epoch of many excesses with damaging effects. This work tackles two emerging streams in the financial literature: the behavioral portfolio theory with mental accounting and the socially responsible investment (SRI). Promoting SRI is regarded by a lot of financial experts, policymakers and researchers from the field of economic and social sciences, as one of the potential solutions in order to avoid future crises. Therefore, new models for this investment approach are necessary. We try to support the class of investors that select their investments under a mental accounting framework and also they want to achieve a certain level of SR quality in their portfolios. In order to reconcile the two choice frames, avoiding unnecessary sacrifices in financial performance, we have designed a model based on goal programming that integrates the two cornerstones of the investor. Furthermore, we propose a fuzzy inference system to determine the amount of money allocated to each mental account as well as the confidence level assigned to each mental account. This tool is based on expert knowledge modeled by fuzzy if-then rules.
This paper presents an application of data envelopment analysis (DEA) based approaches to assess the relative financial and nonfinancial efficiency of mutual funds (MFs). Our approach measures corporate sustainability (CS) of the MFs from the rating process carried out by social agencies on the constituent firms. We have modified the raw scores of the firms invested in by the MFs in order to overcome the compensatory effect when the MFs invested in both "good" and "bad" firms. For this purpose, we have used prospect theory in such a manner that the original scores awarded to the firms are modified by applying a value function. Three extensions of Branda's model are formulated. The first model measures financial efficiency, the second model measures CS efficiency and is an output-oriented DEA model, and, the third is a DEA model for measuring overall efficiency of the MFs. In the last step of the proposed methodology, the set of overallefficient MFs is ranked applying technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution to the two DEA scores corresponding to the two partial DEA models. The risk and return measures have been chosen so that the proposed models are consistent with the second-order stochastic dominance relation. Therefore, under a finite number of equiprobable scenarios for the rates of return, a set of conditional value at risk for several confidence levels are used as inputs of the models that consider the financial performance. The proposed approach is illustrated with real data on a set of 144 French MFs, 31 marketed as socially responsible investment MFs.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.