The thesis explores the question of whether immigrants can spur the internationalization and innovation activities of the local production systems of their countries of destination. It is composed of two parts. In the first part, migrants' pro-trade effects is analysed through a theory-consistent gravity model augmented with migration variables. The analysis takes subnational units, i.e. NUTS3 regions, and compares Italy and Spain. The empirical model allows for subnationally heterogeneous multilateral resistance term. An econometric strategy based on Head and Mayer (2014) is implemented to address the main econometric issues and to select the suitable estimator. This leads to selecting the Gamma PML estimator in the case of Spain and the OLS estimator in the Italian case. The results suggest that applying the same model to different contexts can lead to different results: immigration is found to have a positive trade facilitating effect in the Spanish case and a negative trade-diverting role in the Italian case. This difference is attributed to specificities in the composition and integration patterns of the immigrant population in the two countries; tentative explanations are proposed for the negative effect. The second part of the thesis analyses the determinants of immigrants’ employment focussing, in a comparative perspective, on two case studies of local systems specialized in the mechanic sector, i.e. Reggio Emilia in Italy and Elgoibar in Spain. The two are similar in many respects - income and employment levels, sectoral specialisation, high levels of local social capital - but are marked by quite different capacity of integrating immigrant labour in the core industry. Drawing on the availability of two sets of similar firm-level microdata at the corresponding NUTS2 levels, cluster and discriminant analysis are performed to outline the characteristics of firms hiring immigrants in each context. The comparison of the two regions shows that, in the more inclusive context, immigrants are also much more frequently employed in knowledge-oriented firms. The subjective determinants for hiring immigrants are deepened in a series of semi-structured interviews with the employers. In the local system marked by bridging social capital, immigrants’ employment is found to be determined by a wider set of considerations that span well beyond labour replacement in manual tasks. Diverse work teams are reported to contribute to product development and innovation allowing a combination of cost-saving standardization and cultural-specific customizability to serve foreign tastes.

This dissertation aims to test, in a controlled laboratory setting, the role of dierent types of both monetary and non-monetary incentives in coordination. Although complexity and task interdependence have rapidly grown, organizations have often overlooked the importance of integrating specialized activities, hence causing organizations to drift into, or stay locked in, inecient equilibria for a wide range of coordination problems. I adopted an experimentally-grounded approach to organizational design which has long been neglected by both economics and management scholars, and in an attempt to enhance the generalizability of the results to actual organizations, I carried out a series of experiments in which real-eort tasks are implemented. The present dissertation is organized as follows: Chapter 1 and 2 critically review the relevant literature on coordination games and real effort in laboratory experiments, respectively. Chapter 3 compares individual and group-based incentives in a real-eort coordination game. In line with some empirical evidence on actual organizations, group-based payments work as good as, and in some cases outperform, individual-based payments. Chapter 4 tests the impact of group pride on coordination. I found a large and statistically signicant eect of information about ranking and matching procedure on coordination. Chapter 5 test the robustness of group pride across dierent tasks. Quite surprisingly, group pride induced by a task related to the one used in the coordination phase was not eective, while group pride induced by an unrelated task was eective in enhancing coordination among top performers.

This thesis analyses the impact of three different trade shocks on labour market outcomes and firms’ performance. The first chapter evaluates the impact of an increase in import competition on employment, gender employment gap and structural transformation in Ethiopia over the 1994-2013 period. In the second chapter, the objective is to investigate the changes in the Egyptian trade policies on wages and job stability, with a panel dataset covering a 20 years period (1998-2018); the last chapter examines the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic on firms with different modes of internationalization, in terms of changes in sales and in business strategies. By exploiting three different very rich micro-level datasets, we study trade shocks under three different perspectives: a worker-level perspective, a firm-level perspective and a local labour market perspective. What emerges is that the impact of trade shocks is ultimately an empirical question, and that the direction of results greatly depends on the economic context under analysis. When trade liberalization is implemented in countries whose structural transformation process is still at an early stage, as in the Ethiopian case, this can harm rather than benefit their economies. On the other hand, the evidence in the third chapter suggests that being interconnected in the international market can help firms mitigating the shock, not only when the shock is domestic or idiosyncratic, but also, as in the case of Covid-19, when the it affects the whole global economy.

Infrastructural investments are crucial drivers for promoting growth and activating virtuous cycles of development. Their allocation processes and their socio-economic impact are themes of fundamental importance for development economics. The first two chapters of this thesis employ quasi-experimental methods to analyze the Road Sector Development Programme (RSDP), a large-scale infrastructural investment project implemented in Ethiopia between 1998-2016. The first chapter investigates whether road investment decisions have been influenced by ethnic favoritism mechanisms benefiting the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the dominant component of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). We find evidence of a significant misallocation of public resources towards areas inhabited by the Tigray ethnicity with respect to a suitable control group. The second chapter looks at the impact of the increase in market access due to the RSDP on the productivity of formal and informal Ethiopian firms. Given the important role of informality in Sub-Saharan Africa, it is paramount to disentangle their reaction to productivity shocks from that of formal enterprises. We detect an increase in productivity for formal firms and a decrease in the likelihood of a firm being informal, compatible with the “entry into informality” of less productive formal enterprises and with the presence of informal “survivalist” firms at lower tiers of the productivity distribution. The third chapter employs near-real time satellite data to assess the economic and environmental impact of the Covid-19 contagion containment measures enacted by a selected group of Arab countries, therefore bringing to prominence the use of large, granular, and publicly available datasets for informing crisis response.

This dissertation aims to contribute to the literature of cooperation and social preferences. We use experimental and computational methods to understand the role and extent of reciprocity on cooperation. The first paper is a methodological contribution to the large literature on conditional preferences of cooperation. Cooperation generated by this type of preferences is notoriously unstable, as individuals reduce their contributions to the public good in reaction to other subjects' free-riding. This has led to the widely-shared conclusion that cooperation observed in experiments (and its collapse) is mostly driven by imperfect reciprocity. In this study, we explore the possibility that reciprocally cooperative preferences may themselves be unstable. We do so by observing the evolution of subjects' preferences in an anonymously repeated social dilemma. Our unsettling result is that, in the course of the experiment, a significant fraction of reciprocally cooperative subjects become egoistic, while the reverse is rarely observed. The non-selfish preferences that appear to be more stable are those most easily attributed to confusion. We are thus driven to the conclusion that egoism is more resistant to exposure to social dilemmas than reciprocity. The second paper the evolutionary success of conditional preferences by using simulations. We use an agent-based model in which agents play a variation of the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game. We estimate the likelihood of cooperation levels as well as the likelihood of the existence of conditional types for different continuation probabilities. We show that an all-or-none type of conditional cooperation strategy together with the perfect conditional cooperation strategy are most likely to emerge when the continuation probability is sufficiently high. Our most surprising finding is related to the so-called hump-shaped strategy, a conditional type that is commonly observed in experiments. Our simulations show that those types are likely to thrive for intermediate levels of the continuation probability due to their relative advantage when probability of interaction is not enough to sustain a full-cooperation, but instead merely sustains mid-level cooperation. The third paper aims to understand the underlying reciprocal motives in altruistic behavior. We argue that the altruism that is revealed in dictator games can be explained by what we call presumptive reciprocity. Subjects may display non-selfish preferences because they presume that the other subjects would have revealed similar, non-selfish preferences if the roles had been reversed. This kind of intuitive reasoning, although partially captured by indirect reciprocity, is overlooked in the literature on social preferences, especially when it comes to explaining the behavior that appears to be purely altruistic. The experimental evidence we provide shows that people's choices reveal mostly presumptive reciprocity, while purely altruistic preferences play a much smaller role.

Questa tesi utilizza metodologie differenti al fine di esplorare argomenti generalmente ascritti all'economia dello sviluppo. Il primo capitolo discute la letteratura sul capitale sociale scomponendolo nel suo componente strutturale, le reti, e cognitivo, la fiducia. Ogni componente è a sua volta scomposto in diverse sotto-dimensioni una delle quali, il particolarismo, è utilizzato nel secondo capitolo, sia a livello teorico che empirico, come determinante di forme di corruzione collusiva. Come previsto dalla teoria, il particolarismo ha un effetto positivo e causale sulla probabilità di offrire una tangente. Il terzo capitolo valuta l'impatto di un progetto di estensione agricola realizzato in Etiopia, volto ad introdurre la coltivazione di nuovi prodotti ortofrutticoli insieme ad alcune tecniche e strumenti innovativi. Empiricamente si utilizzano gli strumenti della valutazione d’impatto combinando confronti tra villaggi, attraverso una stima difference-in-differences, con una comparazione all'interno del villaggio usando uno studio controllato randomizzato. I risultati indicano che il progetto ha contribuito alla diversificazione produttiva ma non ha influenzato i ricavi ottenuti dalla vendita dei prodotti ortofrutticoli e, di conseguenza, il benessere delle famiglie. Il quarto capitolo mostra come meccanismi incentivati sufficientemente simili elicitino decisioni correlate in termini di avversione al rischio solo quando si tengono in considerazione altri atteggiamenti relativi al rischio. Inoltre si studia la correlazione tra l'avversione al rischio riportata e l'avversione al rischio ottenuta tramite lotterie. I risultati suggeriscono una misurata validità esterna dei due metodi studiati. / This dissertation makes use of several methodologies to explore topics ascribed to the field of development economics. Chapter 1 reviews the literature on social capital by presenting a decomposition of trust and networks -- the cognitive and the structural component of social capital, respectively--, in several sub-dimensions. One of this dimension is used in chapter 2 where we investigate, both theoretically and empirically, the role played by the cultural norm of particularism, as opposed to universalism, for collusive bribery. Consistent with the theory, particularism is found to have a positive causal effect on the probability of offering a bribe. Chapter 3 assesses the impact of a small-scale agricultural extension project implemented in rural Ethiopia aimed at introducing the cultivation of horticultural gardens. Empirically, a mixed impact evaluation design is used combining across-villages comparisons, through difference-in-differences estimations, with a within village randomized control trial. The findings indicate that the project contributes to production diversification while it does not influence total revenues from sales, household welfare and diet. Chapter 4 shows that similar incentivized mechanisms elicit similar decisions in terms of monetary risk aversion only if other risk-related attitudes are accounted for. Furthermore, it examines whether individuals' characteristics and a self-assessed measure of risk aversion relate to individuals' choices in lotteries. The findings suggest that there is some external validity of the two studied tasks as predictors of self-reported risk attitudes.

Negli ultimi dieci anni siamo stati testimoni di una delle più grandi crisi che il mondo ha visto. Il lavoro dei macroeconomisti è diventato più attivo, nell'urgenza di trovare la via d'uscita, molti degli strumenti applicati per la professione di economista sono stati rispolverati ed aggiornati per le nuove esigenze della crisi economica. Tra gli strumenti per la ricerca economica c'è lo modello dinamico stocastico di equilibrio generale (DSGE). Questa tesi è composta da quattro capitoli che coinvolgono l'intermediazione e/o politiche condotte dai governi o banche centrali finanziarie. I primi tre capitoli partono sul modello DSGE mentre l' ultimo su un modello macroeconomico principale-agente. Il primo (scritto come una rassegna delle principali indagini in DSGE) trata dei cicli di credito, di acceleratori finanziari, del mercato immobiliare, del settore bancario, dell'assunzione dei rischi e delle politiche monetarie. Il secondo analizza l'impatto delle variazioni tra il rapporto di leva e le riserve necessarie all'interno, che al giorno d'oggi regolano alcune delle politiche popolari. Il terzo capitolo incorpora un mercato dei prestiti interbancari per l'analisi degli shock di rischio generato nel settore bancario e come si sviluppa l'economia. Il quarto invece è un'indagine che si scosta dal modello macroeconomico principale-agente; comprende un governo attivo con le tasse e sussidi di disoccupazione. / During the last decade we were witness of one of the biggest crises that the world has seen. The job of the macroeconomists became more active, in the urgency for finding the way out; many of the tools applied for the economist profession were dusted off and updated for the new needs of the economic crisis. Among the tools for economic research there is the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Model (DSGE). This dissertation consists of four chapters involved in financial intermediation and/or policies conducted by the governments or central banks. The first three chapters depart from the DSGE model while the last is a macroeconomic agent based model. The first, written as a review of the main investigations in the DSGE, covers several fields as credit cycles, financial accelerator, housing market, banking sector, risk taking and monetary policies. The second chapter analyses the impacts of changes in the leverage ratio and the required reserves within, some of the popular regulation policies nowadays. The third chapter incorporates an interbank lending market for the analysis of risk shocks generated in the banking sector and how it is spread to the economy. The fourth chapter is an investigation that departs from the macroeconomic agent based model; it incorporates an active government with taxes and unemployment subsidies.

Questa tesi è una raccolta di due capitoli che indagano due temi distinti di ricerca in economia del lavoro e dell'istruzione. Nel primo capitolo, si studiano gli effetti causali di una nuova politica di ammissione selettiva introdotta presso il Dipartimento di Economia di una importante università private situata nel nord d'Italia. Si trovano significativi miglioramenti nei risultati accademici degli studenti del primo anno che sono esposti alla nuova politica di ammissione in termini di una riduzione del tasso di abbandono scolastico e di un aumento dei crediti compiuti. Nel secondo capitolo di questa tesi, da un'altra parte, si fornisce un'evidenza recente sulla struttura dinamica e di autocovarianza del reddito di lavoro maschile italiano e si caratterizzano gli shock sul reddito del lavoro per tutto il ciclo di vita sfruttando dei dati amministrativa di grande scala provenienti dagli archivi dell'INPS. Osserviamo un aumento sostanziale della varianza del reddito degli individui di età compresa tra 50 e 60 anni. Tali risultati suggeriscono che questo aumento della varianza è guidato dall'aumento della varianza sia del componente transitorio che permanente della disuguaglianza di reddito. Tuttavia, l'accelerazione per gli individui sopra i 50 anni è causato dalla fluttuazione della varianza dei shock transitori. / This thesis is a collection of two chapters that investigate two different research topics in labor and education economics. In the first chapter, we study the causal effects of a new selective admission policy introduced in the Department of Economics at a leading private university located in the North of Italy. We find significant improvements in the academic outcomes of first year students who are exposed to this new admission policy in terms of reduction in the drop-out rate and increase in the average credits. In the second chapter of this thesis, on the other hand, we provide up-to-date evidence on the dynamic and autocovariance structures of Italian males' labor income and characterize labor income shocks over the life-cycle by exploiting a large-scale administrative data from the archives of Italian Social Security Administration (INPS). We observe a substantial increase in the variance of log-incomes of individuals between the ages of 50 and 60. Our results suggest that the latter increase in the variance is driven by the increases in the variances of both transitory and permanent components of income inequality. However, the accelerating pattern after age 50 is caused by the fluctuations in the variance of transitory shocks.

[pt] Esta dissertação é um estudo acerca dos efeitos do comércio internacional sobre o bem-estar interno dos países. O trabalho parte da evidência de que há países com estruturas econômicas similares, inclusive um alto grau de abertura econômica, que, no entanto, têm um desempenho muito diferente em seu IDH, utilizado como taxa representativa do bem-estar . São examinados os casos de Chile e Venezuela nos anos 90 e chega-se à conclusão de que, embora em países com uma alta exposição ao comércio exterior este seja em grande parte responsável pela evolução das economias nacionais, a forma como ele se reflete no bem-estar depende da intervenção do Estado, por meio da implementação de políticas públicas. A pesquisa é feita em um enquadramento teórico de Economia Política Internacional (EPI). A proposta de Susan Strange de analisar as questões da EPI em função de diferentes estruturas de poder é aplicada ao nível nacional, e os efeitos do comércio internacional sobre o IDH são examinados como os de uma estrutura do comércio particularmente influente sobre uma estrutura do bem-estar. / [en] This thesis is a study of the effects of international trade on social welfare within countries. The analysis starts from the evidence that there are countries with similar economic structures, including a high level of economic openness which, however, have a very different performance on their HDI, taken as a proxy for their welfare. The cases of Chile and Venezuela in the 1990s are examined. The conclusion is that, although trade, in countries highly exposed to it, is to a great extent responsible for the evolution of national economies as a whole, the way it affects welfare depends on the intervention of the state, through the implementation of policies. The research is done within an International Political Economy (IPE) framework. Susan Strange's proposition of analyzing the questions of IPE as the work of different power structures is applied at the national level, and the effects of international trade on HDI are examined as those of a particularly strong trade structure on a welfare structure.

Utilizzando un campione di imprese non finanziarie quotate appartenenti all'area euro, analizzo le determinanti della struttura finanziaria aziendale. Coerentemente con il tradizionale approccio teorico, utilizzo una misura dell'indebitamento a valori di mercato, stimato col modello di Black-scholes-merton. alcune variabili analizzate hanno effetti simili nei vari paesi, mentre altre cambiano: il rischio, misurato con la volatilità del valore di mercato dell'attivo, è la variabile più rilevante. Il rischio e l'asimmetria informativa su di esso rendono il debito meno attraente, a causa di maggior costi attesi di fallimento, minore vantaggio fiscale e maggiori costi di agenzia. La nazionalità influenza le scelte finanziarie. l'integrazione dei mercati finanziari nell'area euro cambia significativamente a seconda dei segmenti di mercato considerati: il mercato monetario ed interbancario sono fortemente integrati, il mercato obbligazionario ed azionario mostrano di essere su un percorso di integrazione, il mercato del credito bancario è ancora molto frammentato. le normative fiscali e fallimentari differiscono nei dodici paesi, come anche il contesto economico. / Using a sample of non-financial listed firms located in the Euro area, I investigate the determinants of capital structure choices. In line with the traditional theoretical approach, I use a market-value measure of leverage, estimated with the Black-Scholes-Merton model. I find that some variables have similar effects across countries, while others may play a different role; risk, measured as the volatility of the market enterprise value, is the best predictor of observed leverage ratios. Risk, and asymmetric information about risk, make debt less attractive, because of higher expected bankruptcy costs, lower expected debt tax shield and higher agency costs. National environments are an important determinant of observed ratios. The integration of Euro-area financial markets varies significantly depending on the market segment considered: money and inter-bank markets are highly integrated, corporate bond and equity markets show a clear path of increasing integration, retail banking markets are much less integrated. Fiscal and bankruptcy rules differ across the twelve countries; the economic background varies as well.