L'obbiettivo di questa tesi è di investigare il ruolo della formazione delle aspettative nei modelli macroeconomici basati su agenti e stock-flussi coerenti. Mentre ci sono stati notevoli passi avanti nello sviluppo di tali modelli, la ricerca sulla formazione e sul ruolo delle aspettative in essi rimane ancora poco sviluppato. La tesi è composta da tre articoli, ognuno dei quali si focalizza sulla formazione delle aspettative in un settore economico speci co e presenta una serie di esperimenti riguardanti la variazione dei meccanismi di formazione delle aspetta- tive, dinamiche di opinioni e sentimenti, così come le applicazioni delle politiche economiche. La tesi dimostra l'influenza potenzialmente forte delle aspettative dei agenti sulla volatilità macroeconomica e mostra che, dipendendo dalla loro speci cazione e l'ambiente economico, le aspettative possono essere sia un elemento stabilizzante che un elemento destabilizzante. Inoltre, attraverso l'ampia gamma di esperimenti politici condotti, serve a sottolineare il ruolo importante delle politiche stabilizzanti nei sistemi che esibiscono fluttuazioni endogene, e il capitolo 4 in particolare mette in evidenza la potenziale dipendenza dell'efficacia delle politiche economiche dalle aspettative. Allo stesso tempo, alcuni dei risultati ottenuti avvertono che nei sistemi complessi, gli interventi politici devono essere calibrati attentamente affinché non diventino essi stessi fonte di instabilità. / The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the role of expectations formation in agent-based and stock-flow consistent macroeconomic models. While there have been considerable advances in the development of such models, research on the formation and role of beliefs and expectations within them remains underdeveloped. The thesis consists of three papers, each of which focuses on expectations formation in one particular economic sector and presents a range of experiments concerning the variation of expectations formation mechanisms, belief and sentiment dynamics, as well as policy applications. The thesis demonstrates the potentially strong influence of agents' expectations on macroeconomic volatility and shows that depending on their specification as well as the economic environment, expectations can be both a stabilising and destabilising factor. Moreover, through the wide range of policy experiments conducted, it serves to emphasise the important role of stabilisation policies in systems exhibiting endogenous fluctuations and chapter 4 in particular highlights the potential dependence of policy effectiveness on expectations. At the same time, some of the obtained results caution that in complex systems, policy interventions must be carefully calibrated lest they themselves become a source of instability.

[pt] Esta tese é composta por 3 capítulos em Economia do Desenvolvimento, relacionando desastres naturais e a qualidade do ambiente com engajamento político e capital social. No primeiro capítulo, mostramos que desastres naturais podem levar à punição de incumbentes. De forma interessante, tal punição é consequência da heterogeneidade na participação política. Em eleições locais, eleitores em regiões onde o incumbente era do partido no poder a nível nacional (DPJ) compareceram menos às urnas, enquanto eleitores em regiões onde o incumbente era do principal partido concorrente (LDP) compareceram mais. Como consequência, o partido no poder perdeu mais assentos. A potencial razão para a heterogeneidade observada está na decepção na população em relação ao DPJ. Ainda, é também mostrada a heterogeneidade em relação ao nível de capital social. Enquanto é mais associado à maior participação política, a maior resiliência potencialmente levou a uma diferença no padrão de votos. O segundo capítulo sugere um arcabouço teórico para conectar as literaturas empírica e teórica sobre a influência da qualidade e dos riscos ambientais na formação de comportamento cooperativo. Em linha com a literatura empírica, mostra que, a depender das relações entre o ambiente e um bem público e das crenças dos indivíduos sobre o comportamento cooperativo dos demais, quanto maior for a probabilidade de ocorrência de tempos ruins, maior será a propensão de indivíduos em uma comunidade de agirem coletivamente. Finalmente, o terceiro capítulo investiga os efeitos de desastres naturais na formação de capital social e em sua persistência no longo prazo. Se valendo se dados em terremotos passados no Japão, mostra que indivíduos vivendo em cidades rurais Japonesas que foram atingidas no passado exibem hoje em dia níveis mais altos de confiança e engajamento político. / [en] This thesis consists of 3 chapters in development economics that relate natural disasters and environmental quality to political engagement and social capital. In the first chapter, we show that natural disasters can lead to punishment of incumbents. Interestingly, such punishment is the result of some heterogeneity in political participation. In local elections, turnout was lower in regions where the incumbent belonged to the party in power at the country level (DPJ), while turnout was higher in regions where the incumbent belonged to the main rival (LDP). As a result, the ruling party suffered a loss in these elections. The possible reason for this heterogeneity lies in the population s disappointment with the DPJ. In addition, it shows a further heterogeneity in regards to the level of social capital. Whereas it is related to higher political participation, the associated higher community resilience possibly led to different voting behavior. The second chapter proposes a theoretical framework to link the empirical and theoretical literatures on the influence of environmental quality and risk on the emergence of cooperative behavior. Consistent with the empirical literature, it is shown that depending on the relationship between the environment and the club good and individuals beliefs about the cooperative behavior of others, the higher the probability of bad times, the greater the propensity of individuals to engage in collective action within a community. Finally, the third chapter examines the impact of natural disasters on the formation of social capital and its long-term persistence. Using data on ancient earthquakes in Japan, it is shown that people living in rural Japanese cities that were strongly hit in the past currently exhibit higher levels of trust and political engagement.

[pt] Esta é uma pesquisa do campo da Economia Política da Comunicação, Informação e Cultura (EPC) que dialoga com os estudos que analisam o processo de produção de notícias pensado a partir da categoria trabalho, dentro de uma perspectiva marxista. As empresas de comunicação, no Brasil e em quase todo o mundo, se encontram no contexto capitalista e, por isso, buscam em primeiro lugar o lucro, o qual vem sendo abalado pela disrupção do modelo de negócios dessas empresas, com a chegada da internet e das plataformas digitais. A investigação busca compreender de que maneira as rotinas produtivas do jornalismo dentro deste contexto favorecem a precarização do trabalho e afetam não só a produção, mas as condições físicas e psicológicas dos profissionais da área, principalmente após a chegada da pandemia de covid-19. A pesquisa tem como base métodos quantitativos e qualitativos aplicados sobre uma amostra de 218 respostas de um questionário enviado a jornalistas de todo país e entrevistas em profundidade com 21 repórteres que atuam no Rio de Janeiro no noticiário diário de empresas de comunicação de relevância nacional. Esta dissertação constata forte instabilidade na profissão, crescimento da precarização do fazer jornalístico e desqualificação dos trabalhadores, além do aumento dos sinais de esgotamento entre os jornalistas. / [en] This is a research in the field of Political Economy of Communication, Information and Culture (EPC) that is in dialogue with studies that analyze the process of news production from the category of work, within a marxist perspective. Communication companies in Brazil are in the capitalist context and, therefore, pursue profit first, which has been affected by the disruption of these companies business models, with the arrival of the internet and digital platforms. The investigation seeks to understand how the productive routines of journalism within this context favour the precariousness of work and affect not only production, but also the physical and psychological conditions of professionals in the field, especially after the arrival of the covid-19 pandemic. The research is based on quantitative and qualitative methods applied to a sample of 218 responses to an online survey questionnaire sent to journalists across the country and in-depth interviews with 21 reporters who work in Rio de Janeiro with the daily news in media companies of national relevance. This dissertation found strong instability in the profession, a growth in the precariousness of journalistic work and a disqualification of workers, in addition to an increase in the signs of exhaustion among journalists.

[pt] Esta tese é formada por três artigos, o primeiro em economia organizacional e cultura; os dois últimos em economia política. No primeiro capítulo, nós modelamos a relação entre a disseminação de normas sociais de ética do trabalho e incentivos propostos pelas firmas, que motivamos utilizando evidência de três bases de dados diferentes. No segundo capítulo, examinamos se a renda dos vizinhos afeta o voto de eleitores, utilizando dados de resultados de eleições presidenciais (2004 até 2012) nos Estados Unidos, por zona eleitoral e grupo de bairros. Com isso, buscamos contribuir para o entendimento das razões que levam a diferentes níveis de demanda por redistribuição de renda. Como estratégia de identificação, utilizamos efeitos fixos de ano e dummies de trato e ano; trato sendo a menor unidade geográfica maior que o grupo de blocos (em média, um trato contém 4 grupos de blocos). No terceiro capítulo, estudamos patronagem, investigando o efeito da vitória de um candidato a prefeito de um partido na probabilidade de membros deste partido (ou de partidos da mesma coalizão) ocuparem cargos públicos no governo; ou de sua renda advinda do governo aumentar, caso já sejam empregados públicos. Analisamos também o efeito da vitória de um partido sobre o número de registrados a este partido nos anos futuros, o que indicaria um desejo de sinalizar apoio ao candidato eleito. Estimamos o efeito causal de um partido ocupar a prefeitura, comparando municipalidades em que este partido quase ganhou com cidades em que quase perdeu. / [en] This thesis is composed of three papers, the first in organizational economics and culture; the last two in political economics. In the first chapter, we model the relation between dissemination of social norms of work ethic and incentives proposed by firms, which we motivate using evidence from three different datasets. In the second chapter, we examine whether neighbors income affects voting, using data from election results for the 2004-2012 Presidential Elections in Unites States, by precinct and block group. That way, we try to contribute to understanding the reason why there are different demands for income redistribution. As an identification strategy, we use year fixed-effects and tract year dummies; tract is the smallest geographic unit larger than block group (on average, each tract contains 4 block groups). In the third chapter, we study patronage, investigating the effect of a mayoral candidate s victory on the probability that members of his party (or parties in the same presidential coalition) occupy public jobs in the government, or on their income accrued from government, in case they are already public employees. We also analyze the effect of a party s victory over the number of registered members of that party in future years, which would indicate that voters affiliate to political parties as a way to signal support to the office holder. We estimate plausibly causal effects of a party holding mayoral position by comparing municipalities where that party nearly won with places where it nearly lost.

[pt] Muitas das perspectivas críticas às Relações Internacionais (RI) argumentam que a conceitualização acadêmica do internacional-global está calcada na universalização da modernidade Ocidental alternativa superior ao pensamento político. Entretanto, esta perspectiva raramente teoriza a Economia Política do Conhecimento (EPC) que sustenta a superioridade de certos princípios através das trocas mercadológicas desiguais de saber universitário. A perspectiva da EPC têm se destacado nos últimos anos, discutindo o impacto da globalização capitalista na padronização neoliberal da educação, impacto este bastante evidenciado nas universidades brasileiras. Apesar disso, a abordagem da economia política pouco contribui para refletir a própria significação do global e do internacional como dinâmica de poder central. Navegando nestas lacunas teóricas, a presente pesquisa se debruça sobre a EPC, porém teorizando como esta economia política pode ser considerada internacional e global. A pergunta da pesquisa é: como a experiência pedagógica no ensino superior brasileiro, bem como sua inserção em uma EPC, ajudam a conceituar o internacional e o global? A metodologia da pesquisa consiste em engajar com esta experiência através de uma textualização autobiográfica que interliga relatos sobre a sala de aula de docentes e discentes em turmas brasileiras de graduação, pós-graduação e preparatório comunitário. Com esta metodologia, a pesquisa explora abordagem teórica denominada estudo internacional crítico, que sugere as salas de aula como pontos nodais de uma EPC internacional-global multifacetada, que, por sua vez, empurra a pedagogia para suas formas mais dialógicas. Através desta abordagem, a pesquisa argumenta em favor da relação coconstitutiva entre a pedagogia e a política internacional-global. / [en] Many critical perspectives on International Relations (IR) argue that the academic conception of the international-global is based on the universalization of Western modernity as the superior alternative to political thought. However, this perspective rarely theorizes the Political Economy of Knowledge (PEK) that sustains the superiority of certain principles through unequal market exchanges of university knowledge. The PEK perspective has stood out in recent years, discussing the impact of capitalist globalization on the neoliberal standardization of education, an impact that is quite evident in Brazilian universities. Despite this, the political economy approach does little to reflect the very meaning of the global and the international as a central dynamic of power. Navigating these theoretical gaps, the present research focuses on the PEK, but theorizing how this political economy can be considered international and global. The research question is: how does the pedagogical experience in Brazilian higher education, as well as its insertion in an PEK, help to conceptualize the international and the global? The research methodology consists of engaging with this experience through an autobiographical textualization that interconnects reports about the classroom of teachers and students in Brazilian undergraduate, graduate and communiarian prepschools classes. With this methodology, the research explores the theoretical approach called critical international study, which suggests classrooms as nodal points of a multi-faceted international-global PEK, which, in turn, pushes pedagogy towards its most dialogical forms. Through this approach, the research argues in favor of the co-constitutive relationship between pedagogy and international-global politics.

[pt] Desde o início do século XXI, com o avanço das plataformas digitais, a imprensa tradicional perdeu parte de sua principal fonte de receita, a publicidade, para novos integrantes da cadeia jornalística, sobretudo Google e Facebook. Posicionando-se como distribuidoras do material noticioso, as big techs passaram anos lucrando sem remunerar as empresas de mídia pelo conteúdo produzido. Nesse contexto neoliberal, alicerçado pela utopia da internet como um território livre e democrático, a presente dissertação analisa a cobertura do jornal O Globo a respeito da regulação de direitos autorais na internet, base legal para que as plataformas remunerem os produtores do conteúdo jornalístico. O referencial teórico é a Economia Política da Comunicação e sua abordagem crítica sobre o conhecimento construído no mundo a partir das relações de poder nas esferas econômica, social e política. A metodologia utilizada foi a Análise de Conteúdo, a partir de um corpus de 41 matérias, além de nove editoriais e artigos de opinião, publicados entre 2016 e 2022. Aliado a um olhar qualitativo, o ferramental quantitativo revelou o despertar tardio da empresa para a questão em análise - que afeta a viabilidade do modelo de financiamento jornalístico e, consequentemente, a sobrevivência corporativa de O Globo. / [en] Since the beginning of the 21st century, with the advancement of digital platforms, traditional press has lost a significant portion of its main revenue source, advertising, to new players in the journalistic chain, mainly Google and Facebook. Presenting themselves as news distributors, big tech companies have been profiting for years without compensating media companies for the content created. In this neoliberal context, based on an utopian idea of the internet as a free and democratic territory, this dissertation analyzes O Globo newspaper s coverage regarding the regulation of copyright on the internet, which provides a legal basis for platforms to remunerate journalistic content producers. The theoretical framework is the Political Economy of Communication and its critical approach to the knowledge constructed in the world based on power relations in economic, social, and political spheres. The methodology used was Content Analysis, based on a corpus of 41 articles, in addition to nine editorials and opinion pieces, published between 2016 and 2022. In conjunction with a qualitative approach, the quantitative tools revealed the company s late awakening to the issue under analysis - which affects the viability of the journalistic financing model and, consequently, O Globo s corporate survival.

[pt] Nesta tese, examinamos como as Tecnologias da Informação e da Comunicação (TICs) se desenvolveram na China a partir de especificidades históricas, do papel do Estado e das empresas privadas de tecnologia, organizadas dentro de uma economia de plataformas, considerada setor estratégico para a política de modernização empreendida pelo Estado chinês. Esta pesquisa está situada no subcampo da Economia Política da Comunicação (EPC), derivada da Crítica da Economia Política que, por seu caráter transversal a diferentes campos das Ciências Sociais, pode fornecer ferramentas importantes para compreender fenômenos comunicacionais e culturais nas novas configurações das sociedades informacionais. Definimos como objetivos deste trabalho reconstruir o caminho do desenvolvimento das Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TICs) na China nos séculos XX e XXI e seus impactos econômicos e políticos, além de examinar como se estruturam as big techs chinesas e suas versões globais, suas características e como tais empresas privadas se relacionam com o Estado. Utilizamos como procedimentos metodológicos a pesquisa bibliográfica e a análise documental, contemplando uma literatura que permite olhar a China a partir de sua experiência imperial e revolucionária, além de discussões conceituais sobre plataformas e o processo de enraizamento de estruturas digitais na vida cotidiana, chamado de plataformização. A análise de documentos permitiu mapear o estado da plataformização na China, os desafios, os tensionamentos e como isso se articula dentro da nova onda de progresso técnico com consequências diretas sobre dinâmicas de produção e de acumulação de capital. Concluímos que, embora o desenvolvimento das TICs tenha conduzido a China a desafios semelhantes aos enfrentados por países ocidentais como a formação de monopólios de empresas de plataformas, cujos modelos de negócios estão amparados na coleta e análise massiva de dados, há especificidades importantes que não permitem o mero espelhamento das estruturas das plataformas chinesas com as ocidentais, notadamente as estadunidenses. Tendo tomado, inicialmente, as plataformas dos EUA como inspiração, as chinesas aproveitaram brechas dentro da organização chinesa para desenvolver arranjos absolutamente particulares nos níveis social e econômico e também político. / [en] In this thesis, we examine how Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have developed in China based on historical specificities, the role of the State and private technology companies structured within a platform economy model, considered a strategic sector for the modernization policy deployed by the Chinese State. This research is situated in the subfield of the Political Economy of Communication (PEC) context, which derives from the Critique of Political Economy, which in turn, due to its transversal nature across different fields of Social Sciences, it can provide important tools to understand communication and cultural phenomena in the new configurations of information societies. The objectives of this work are to reconstruct the path of development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in China in the 20th and 21st centuries, and to examine their economic and politic impacts. Additionally, the study will analyze how Chinese big techs and their global versions are structured, their characteristics, and how such private companies relate to the State. In this research, we use bibliographic research and documentary analysis as methodological procedures, contemplating literature that allows us to look at China from its imperial and revolutionary experience, as well as conceptual discussions on platforms and the process of embedding digital structures in everyday life, called platformization. Document analysis allowed us to map the state of platformization in China, the challenges, the tensions, and how this articulates within the new wave of technical progress with direct consequences on production dynamics and capital accumulation. We conclude that although the development of ICTs has led China to challenges similar to those faced by Western countries, such as the formation of platform company monopolies, whose business models are supported by massive data collection and analysis, there are important specificities that do not allow a mere reflection of Chinese platform structures with Western ones, notably American ones. Having initially taken inspiration from North American platforms, the Chinese have taken advantage of gaps within the Chinese organization to develop arrangements that are absolutely particular at the social, economic and political levels.

Social attitude is the approach of a person displayed towards other individuals or groups. Social attitude comprehensively affects the way we perceive, behave in, and interact with, the surrounding world; it is simply not possible to understand complex social behaviour such as strategic thinking without first knowing the attitude of the parties involved. Several disciplines contribute to the complex study of social attitude (social preferences in economics, social value orientation in psychology), but only recently have these disciplines started to communicate and develop comprehensive definitions and models. In particular, the current research debate focuses on pinpointing the nature of social attitude (e.g., what its defining components are), the factors that influence it (e.g. context, other individuals), as well as its consequences (e.g., its relevance for self-image representation). This thesis aims to answer to some of the open questions in the literature by testing and comparing the proposed competing explanations. The studies presented are based on a series of behavioural experiments coupled with established but also newly developed measurement tools concerning social norms and personal preferences. In addition, we try to uncover the mental processes underlying decisions with the help of computational models. The thesis is structured as follows. In Chapter 1, We outline a brief summary of the theories on social attitude from the economic and psychological literature, and describe the main tasks and models employed in the thesis. Chapter 2 explores how social attitude is influenced by others’ behaviour. We conduct a systematic comparison of the possible mechanisms driving attitude conformity using various experimental conditions, computational models, and control tasks (e.g., norm elicitation). We find that participants conform due to both peer influence (by learning from others about how salient a norm is) and compliance to authority (i.e. experimenter demand effects). Chapter 3 studies the effect of context in a task eliciting social attitude. We specifically test the effect of unavailable choices, that we call ”meta-context”, on participant’s decisions. We find that participants’ concerns about social norms, as well as their choices, depend on the currently available options, but also on meta-context. In Chapter 4, we study whether individuals tend to selectively forget about their morally questionable choices, and information related to it, such as the context in which the choice was made. We find that participants recollect less correctly selfish or anti-social choices compared to pro-social ones, but we find no memory bias concerning the context of the choice. Moreover, we uncover some potential evidence of a second memory bias related to choice frequency: people are generally more pro-social than antisocial, which means antisocial choices are more rare and thus more difficult to remember correctly. Finally, in chapter 5 We summarise the main findings of the thesis and present some conclusions. We try to integrate the various results to propose an empirically-informed model of social attitude to be applied in future research on the topic.

The overall goal of this work is to study the effect of a crisis on the distribution and employment and the space of manoeuvre of the government for supporting and reverting the negative shock produced by such a crisis. Every chapter of this work and the related models are supported by both a theoretical background analysis and by numerical dynamic simulations. Stylized facts show that the income and wealth inequality in all the OECD countries has been constantly increasing after the 1960s. Piketty has been one of the most important authors that highlighted the rising inequality issue, mainly in the OECD countries. For example, Piketty (2014) shows that the income share held by the top percentile in countries such as US, Canada and UK increased from 8%-10% in the 1960s up to 14%-18% in the current decade. Similar figures are now provided by the World Inequality Lab that has updated data for almost every country up to 2016. At the same time, the wage share for the majority of the OECD countries substantially decreased. For example, countries such as Italy and Spain experienced a decrease in wage share from about 73% in the 1970s to about 63% in the current decade (Hein, 2014). Taking into account such a stylized fact, we will consider a model with two social classes, workers and capitalists. These social classes differ in terms of their initial endowment, their consumption behaviour, the different loans repayment conditions required to them by the banks and in terms of the ways in which they can use their financeable wealth. This is a very important departure hypothesis from the mainstream point of view models that generally consider a population made up of “a representative agent” of the whole society. Considering the inequality levels that the OECD countries are experiencing, we took the Post-Keynesians school of thought as a very good reference point since it always focused its attention on the relation between the level of employment, the aggregate demand and the distribution between social classes. In line with the post-Keynesians tradition, we believe that a theory cannot be correct unless it starts from realist or realistic hypotheses, although it is recognized that assumptions are always abstractions and simplifications (Lavoie, 2014). Therefore, we developed a step by step model with the analysis of an economy based on some well-known stylized facts. Beyond the social classes distinction, we take into consideration the temporal lag between production and sales of products by firms and the one between income received by the social classes and their expenditure. Those two temporal lags are the very key aspects we focus our attention on in the model presented in Chapter II named “Keynes, Kalecki and Metzler in a Dynamic Distribution Model”. In that chapter, we merge the hints of Keynes and Kalecki about the distribution of social classes and the intervention of the government in supporting the aggregate demand together with Metzler’s hint about the mismatching process between aggregate demand and aggregate production. Metzler’s mismatching process would finally generate inventories of consumption goods. More specifically, it is argued that even if Post-Keynesians models focused their attention on output growth, employment and income distribution relating those issues with a stronger intervention of the state, they all (even the canonical Kaleckian model) overlooked the adjustment - or non-adjustment - dynamics from the ultra-short run to the short run period upon which the short run and long run models are then constructed. In fact, even if the Kaleckian models completely reject the standard neoclassical production function (rejecting diminishing returns and rejecting the substitution between capital and labour) they also very strongly rely on a final equilibrium between aggregate demand and aggregate production. The canonical Kaleckian short run models are constructed upon the consideration of the effective labour demand curve defined as “the locus of combinations between real wages and levels of employment which ensure that all produced goods are sold at the price set by firms” (Lavoie, 2014). As argued by Lavoie (2014), this construction assures that an increase of real wage leads to an increase in the employment level. That has been and still is definitely one of the cornerstones for the Post-Keynesian authors. We argue that the equilibrium assumption between the aggregate demand and the aggregate production plays a key role in obtaining the standard Kaleckian conclusions regarding the relation between effective demand, employment levels and the distribution of surplus product between the social classes. The main question arising from the previous enquiring exercise about adjustment dynamics in the Kaleckian framework is that, because of the overlooking on that adjustment process between aggregate production and aggregate demand, also its conclusions might be consequentially affected. More precisely the main Post-Keynesian Kaleckian conclusions to assess are the following: would it still be true that higher real wages lead to a higher level of employment? Would it still be true that a decrease in the propensity to save will lead to an increase in output and employment? Would it still be true that in order to keep employment from falling, whenever there is an increase in productivity there must be some increase in real wages? And finally, most importantly in terms of policies, would it still be true that in order to keep employment from falling, even when the economy faces a pari passu increase of real wage and productivity level, it would be necessary an increase in real autonomous expenditure such as a strong government one? In this way, our model analyses under which conditions the standard Kaleckian conclusions are still valid considering a disequilibrium situation. Two scenarios are simulated: one with fixed expectations as in Metzler (1941) and another new one based on adaptive expectations and asymmetric behaviour of the wages-unemployment relation. The model questions the effective demand labour curve and suggests that an increase in real autonomous expenditures, mainly by the Government, might be even more essential than what is generally considered in the Kaleckian literature, to avoid increasing unemployment in an increasing wage world. The model presented in Chapter III named “The stabilising role of the Government in a Dynamic Distribution Growth Model” builds upon the model presented in Chapter II and considers once again the effect of a crises on the relation between aggregated demand, employment and distribution between social classes adding important characteristics of realism that were absent in the previous chapter. Here, we consider the gestation period of the investments and the presence of the government investigating its margin of manoeuvre in such an economy. The first aspect takes inspiration by Kalecki (1971) himself who considers the three different Investment stages: investment order or Demand (I^D), investment Production (I^P) and investment delivery or Completion (I^C). In line with a post-Kaleckian perspective, we consider the expected profitability and the capacity utilisation as the two main variables as driving forces for the investment decisions. The second new aspect of this model compared to the one presented in Chapter II is the explicit presence of the government. In fact, even if chapter II suggested the Government as the emblematic autonomous figure able to foster expenditure in times of recession, its actual role in the economy was not analysed. Many post-Keynesian scholars have underlined how recent decades have been characterised by a strong downgrading of the fiscal policy role as a stabilisation instrument of macroeconomic policy (Arestis and Sawyer, 2003). In this way, this chapter analyses exactly the space of manoeuvre of the government and the role of the fiscal policies into a “functional finance” framework where the government "can and should be called upon as a key part of the remedy" (Fazzari, 1994) to ensure a high level of economic activity whenever the private sector is unable to do so by itself. In the light of such a functional finance framework, the government actions should be inspired to achieve a more stable and sustainable growth path. More specifically, we here investigate the possibilities that the Government has to boost and support the economic activity with its two main tools, public investments spending and a taxation system in two scenarios. The first scenario simulates an exogenous fall of private investments while the second one relates to an exogenous increase in labour productivity and real wages. In particular, here we test the canonical Kaleckian model conclusion according to which even when the economy faces a pari passu increase of real wages and productivity level it would be necessary an increase in real autonomous expenditures - such as the one implemented by the government - in order to keep employment from falling. At the same time, the aim of this chapter is also to explore the role of the Government in stabilising the economy exactly thanks to the previous tools. In fact, Chapter II underlined the possibility of an arising unstable path from a mismatching dynamic between aggregate demand and aggregate production. It was argued that such an unstable path might develop because of “wrong” oversensitive expectations of firms regarding the production of consumption goods. Therefore, chapter III focuses exactly on the space of manoeuvre of the government in stabilizing an unstable economic scenario caused by a crisis. The model built in Chapter IV named “The distributive monetary analysis of a sustainable ecological economy” is the natural evolution of the models developed in Chapters II and III. In such a model all the previous stylized facts are contained, namely the temporal lag between production and sales of products by firms, the temporal lag between income received by the social classes and their expenditure, the gestation period of the investments and, finally, the intervention of the government. The most important difference with respect to the models presented in the previous chapters is its overall monetary and ecological framework. In fact, for simplification purposes the previous models were assuming that, in line with a horizontalist approach, commercial banks were providing funds on demand to firms for financing their investments. However, the explicit relations among all the sectors of our economy were not fully exposed. In this chapter Graziani’s endogenous money theory is used and we are developing a Post-Keynesian Stock Flow Consistent (SFC) model to track all the economic relations, both the real and monetary ones. At the same time, the use of a SFC model ensures that “there are no black holes - every flow comes from somewhere and goes somewhere” (Godley W. , 1996) through a rigorous accounting framework, which guarantees a correct and comprehensive integration of all the flows and the stocks of an economy. Such as Kalecki, Graziani and the circuitists economists introduce a preliminary distinction between producers and wage earners. The first step of the monetary circuit is always characterized by firms’ decision to activate production and, in order to do so, they take up loans by commercial banks. In this sense, commercial banks are able to create deposits ex nihilo, granting them loans and, at the same time, creating deposits. In this way, the starting logical cause of the expansion of money is exactly the firms’ willingness of contracting a liability to activate production. In the second step, firms use those loans to pay workers and in this way to obtain the amount of consumption goods desired through the production process. When such funds are transferred by firms to households they instantaneously become income paid for the work provided to firms by workers. Finally, the last step of the Monetary Circuit is characterized by the households’ spending decision to use the money balances previously obtained as income. In this step, while households use their funds to buy consumption goods, firms obtain back those money balances they initially paid to households for their work. In this way, the previous Monetary Circuit analysis is not in contrast with the one made by Kalecki upon the way workers obtain their wages and use all of them to buy consumption goods while capitalists are able to spend just a proportion of their income. Finally, together with its social and monetary framework, our economy is also characterized by an environmental one since we here study the impacts that the economic consumption has in terms of ecological erosion of natural resources. In this way, the model of chapter IV questions the expenditure margins of the Government – in particular after a crisis - and uses the suggestions of the monetary circuit theory to analyse the space for fiscal policies to reduce unemployment boosting the economic activity, to obtain a more equitable distribution between social classes in a sustainable ecological way. Our understanding is that despite many contributions focused on the topics of recovery, distribution and ecological sustainability, few of them tried to tackle them all in a comprehensive way considering the rediscovery of the endogenous money phenomena as one of the most important breakthroughs in the last decades. Here we argue that exactly the endogenous money feature is the essential fil rouge to better understand and connect the three previous important aspects. It is so when we analyse the sectors connections and the policies ones devoted to recovery, and also if we consider how the different incomes and wealth are captured and distributed by the different social classes and finally when we point out the ways of financing long term ecological path to preserve a sustainable environment. Indeed, our overall work in Chapter II, Chapter III and Chapter IV is a step by step construction of an organic and consistent model. It starts with a more theoretical and simplified approach through Chapter II which investigates the (in)stability conditions of the Kaleckian approach while suggesting the presence of an autonomous figure such as the government one. Chapter III adds more real base features through endogenous investments and government presence while Chapter IV finally concludes considering all the real and monetary links of the sectors into a social and ecological framework.

This thesis is made up of four chapters on productivity and efficiency analysis. The first chapter is a critical review of theoretical and empirical literatures related to this broad field, which has attracted a considerable amount of economic research in the last years; the other three chapters are original contributions in different directions. Chapter 2 consists of an extensive Monte Carlo exercise on the misspecification of the inefficiency distribution in stochastic frontier models, Chapter 3 investigates, both theoretically and empirically, the relationship between vertical integration and firm efficiency in the Italian machine tool industry, and, finally, Chapter 4 sheds light on the effect of both inward and outward foreign direct investments on regional productivity growth in Europe. Although each chapter has its own independence, two features characterize the entire thesis: the detection of large differences in production performance both at the micro and aggregate level, and the attempt to relate these differences to other aspects of the production units, starting from economic theory.