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Studies on price trends of seafood products in the medium run remain scarce. In this paper, we investigate changes in first-sale prices of fish sold in France over the last 25 years. Drawing on the index number literature, we construct monthly chained fish price indices which are free from seasonal fluctuations. Our empirical analysis relies on a dataset including 126 million transactions completed in all French fish markets from 1994 to 2020. We show that first-sale prices of seafood products have substantially increased in the medium run, more than the inflation rate, except during the economic crisis from 2007 to 2009 and recently in 2020 due to the Covid pandemic. However, those higher prices have not always led to an increase in sales revenue of fishermen because of the continuous decrease in fish catches. In particular, the economic situation of fisheries has substantially worsen since 2017. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on data from an annual French guidebook published in 2004, this article focuses on the determinants of experts' ratings on Cuban cigars. We find that high quality cigars are more likely to be recommended to more experienced cigar lovers. Both the self-assessed quality and recommendation depend on the length and diameter of the cigars, but also on more subjective characteristics like number and type of aromas. Results from a Fields' decomposition show that the quality of cigars is much more sensitive to the presence of a defect and number of aromas than the experts' recommendation, which is more influenced by the rarity of cigars. Finally, it is essentially the cigars' objective characteristics that have an influence on their prices, meaning that consumers truly benefit from additional qualitative information when reading experts' advice and ratings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]