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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
261

Recherches sur le commerce corinthien en mer Égée et Méditerranée orientale du IXe siècle au milieu du VIe siècle av. J.-C. / Research on Corinthian trade in the Aegean Sea and Eastern Mediterranean between the 9th century and the middle of the 6th century BC.

Vallet, Xavier 19 November 2016 (has links)
Le projet de recherche a comme objectif de mieux saisir le commerce corinthien dans le monde grec et méditerranéen oriental en suivant le volume de ses exportations ainsi que les variations régionales et temporelles et en tentant d’en élucider les mécanismes, qu’ils soient d’origine économique, politique ou sociale. Cette étude s’appuie essentiellement sur les céramiques corinthiennes figurées diffusées pendant la plus grande partie de l’époque archaïque, du IXe siècle jusqu’au milieu du VIe siècle avant J.-C. Les céramiques géométriques, non figurées, à vernis noir et les amphores sont également mis à contribution, dans la mesure du possible, pour affiner l’étude, ainsi que les autres produits d’exportation, moins importants sur le plan quantitatif, comme les chevaux de bronze. L’ensemble des exportations est mis en parallèle avec les importations, beaucoup moins nombreuses, afin d’insérer le commerce corinthien dans le cadre plus large des échanges du monde grec et du monde méditerranéen, et de mieux comprendre la nature des relations économiques qui lient Corinthe à chacun de ses partenaires. Une comparaison avec d’autres corpus, plus amples, permet de mettre l’étude en perspective et de confirmer les grands traits de l’évolution du commerce corinthien en Méditerranée orientale. Chaque grande phase de ce commerce (géométrique, protocorinthien, corinthien) est subdivisée en treize périodes, permettant de suivre l’activité économique tout au long de treize générations d’hommes. L’étude par type de forme permet enfin de suivre l’évolution des goûts et des marchés durant toute la période archaïque / The aim of the research project is to better understand Corinthian trade in the Greek and the Eastern Mediterranean world through the analysis of its exports volume and the local and temporal variations while trying at the same time to clarify its economic, political or social mechanisms. This study is mainly based on the figured Corinthian pottery that spread during most of the Archaic Age from the 9th to the 6th century BC. The geometric pottery (non-figured) and the amphora are also used in the analysis as much as possible, to sharpen our study, as well as other exportation products less important in terms of quantities such as bronze horses. The whole of the exports is studied with the imports which were far fewer in order to put the Corinthian trade into the larger setting of the Greek and Mediterranean trade and to have a better understanding of the nature of the economic relations binding Corinth to its trading partners. A comparison with a wider corpus of documents enables us to put the study into perspective and to reinforce the broad features of the Corinthian trade in the Eastern Mediterranean region. Every big stage of this trade (Geometric, Protocorinthian, Corinthian) is subdivided into thirteen periods allowing us to follow the economic activities along thirteen generations of men. Finally, the study of each type of shapes enables us to follow the evolution of tastes and markets during the whole Archaic Age
262

Electricity investments and development of power generation capacities : An approach of the drivers for investment choices in Europe regarding nuclear energy / Investissement électrique et développement de capacités de production d'électricité : Une approche des déterminants des choix en Europe en matière de nucléaire

Shoai Tehrani, Bianka 07 March 2014 (has links)
Dans un contexte de hausse de prix des énergies et de protection du climat, la thèse s’intéresse à l’investissement dans des capacités électrique, en particulier dans le nucléaire. Partant de l’hypothèse où la Génération IV de réacteurs nucléaires serait prête autour de 2040 pour un déploiement industriel, l’objet de la thèse est d'analyser les conditions d'investissement et de développement de capacités de production d'électricité en France et en Europe à cet horizon, afin d’évaluer les perspectives de développement du nucléaire sur le marché électrique européen et le potentiel développement de la Génération IV. Pour ce faire, le travail de recherche nécessite de prendre du recul et d’étudier de manière générale, en prenant en compte toutes les technologies de production d’électricité, les mécanismes entrant en jeu dans le choix d’investissement de l’électricien lorsqu’il s’agit de renouveler ou d’étendre son parc de production. L’approche économique classique basant généralement le choix de l’investisseur sur une rationalité économique de long terme, elle ne permet pas d’expliquer les choix effectifs constatés dans les mix électriques d’un pays à l’autre. L’objectif de cette thèse est d’identifier les déterminants des choix d’investissement dans des capacités électriques et de proposer une approche permettant de décrire le comportement du choix de l’investisseur allant au-delà du critère classique de rationalité économique de long terme. Une approche pluridisciplinaire a été adoptée pour répondre à la question posée. Elle combine une analyse historique de l’évolution des déterminants des choix en fonction du contexte, une analyse structurelle permettant d’identifier les scénarios les plus favorables à l’émergence de futurs réacteurs nucléaires, une approche de création de valeur permettant proposant de reproduire les préférences des électriciens en fonction des déterminants, et enfin une approche par la théorie des options réelles pour comparer les compétitivités respectives des futurs réacteurs nucléaires de Génération IV avec celle des réacteurs actuels. Il en résulte que des politiques pro-nucléaires seules ne seraient pas suffisantes, mais que seule une politique climatique forte permettrait réellement l’émergence des réacteurs sur le marché. De fort progrès technologiques dans le domaine des renouvelables ne sont pas antinomiques avec le développement de nouveaux réacteurs. A un niveau international, cette analyse pourrait être élargie en prenant en compte les déterminants spécifiques aux autres régions du monde, comme la forte croissance de la demande en électricité des pays émergents. / In a context of growing energy prices and climate change mitigation, the thesis addresses the issues of investments in power generation capacities and in particular nuclear capacities. Given that the Generation IV of nuclear reactors is supposed to be ready in 2040 for industrial deployment, the purpose of the thesis is to study the conditions for electricity investments in France and Europe within this horizon, in order to assess development perspectives for nuclear energy and for potential emergence of Generation IV on the European market. To do so, it is necessary to study the mechanisms at stake in investment choices taking into account all power generating technologies. Economic theory usually bases the choice on long-term economic rationality, which does not allow explain the actual choices observed in European electricity mix. The objective of the research work is thus to identify investment choice drivers and to propose an approach describing the behavior of investors in a more realistic way. A multidisciplinary approach was adopted to explore the question. It combines a historical analysis of drivers evolution according to historical context, a structural analysis of these drivers to identify favorable scenarios for future nuclear reactors, a value creation approach to replicate investors’ preferences in those scenarios, and last, a value option approach focusing on nuclear technologies and comparing competitiveness of Generation IV reactors with current reactors. As a result, only strong climate policy combined to government support to nuclear energy could allow industrial development of Generation IV, while high progress of renewables does not lessen the attractiveness of nuclear energy.On a international level, such analysis could be broaden by taking into account the drivers specific to each area of the world, such as highly growing demand in developing countries.
263

L'Economie à l'épreuve de l'art (1955-1975) : expérimenter la valeur, le marché et la monnaie dans la pratique artistique / The Artist as Economist (1955-1975) : questioning value, market and currency in artistic practice

Cras, Sophie 11 June 2014 (has links)
Cette thèse vise à mettre en lumière les pratiques artistiques des années soixante élargies, en Europe et aux Etats-Unis, qui ont conduit les artistes à interroger l’économie au sein de leur création. Au milieu du XXe siècle, les économistes et les sociologues commençaient à appliquer leurs méthodes au domaine artistique, envisageant l’art comme une « marchandise » voire comme un « investissement » et l’artiste comme une « profession ». La thèse défendue est que les artistes furent symétriquement nombreux à s’approprier les questions économiques, indépendamment des styles et des mouvements, et à proposer des œuvres qui articulaient de manière critique leur propre statut économique. Le but de cette étude est d’éclairer ces œuvres en soulignant leur ancrage dans un contexte d’histoire et de pensée économiques précis. Mais cette recherche a également pour ambition de montrer qu’elles offrent à leur tour un regard privilégié sur l’économie de leur temps, à trois niveaux interdépendants : celui du marché de l’art, entre hausse et crise ; celui, plus macro-économique, de l’inflation, de la chute du système monétaire international et de l’étalon-or ; celui, enfin, de la constitution à l’époque de l’économie comme champ d’expertise formalisé, réservé aux experts. Les quatre parties de cette thèse interrogent quatre notions économiques fondamentales : la valeur et le prix à partir du tournant de 1960 (avec les œuvres d’Yves Klein, de Giuseppe Gallizio et de Robert Filliou) ; la monnaie en 1962 (avec les cas de Larry Rivers et Andy Warhol) ; les marchés financiers à la fin des années 1960 (avec l’art conceptuel) ; le commerce au début des années 1970 (avec Ray Johnson et Marcel Broodthaers). / This doctoral thesis aims to enlighten art works and practices from the larger Sixties, in Europe and the United States, which questioned economics from within artistic creation. In the mid-20th century, economists and sociologists started to extend their tools and analyses to the artistic realm, presenting artworks as “goods” or “investments,” and artists as “professionals.” In turn, I argue, artists simultaneously decided to place economics at the heart of their practice and to produce artworks that critically articulated their own economic position. The goal of this study is to enhance the knowledge and appreciation of these art works by grounding them in a precise economic and historical context. I also hope to demonstrate that art offered a privileged viewpoint on the economics of its time, at three interdependent levels: the art market, from boom to crisis; the macro-economic level of inflation, the fall of the international monetary system and the gold standard; the construction of economics as a disciplinary field, formalized and reserved to experts. The four parts of this thesis question four major economic notions: price and value starting at the turn of the 1960s (with works by Yves Klein, Giuseppe Gallizio and Robert Filliou); the currency in 1962 (with the study cases of Larry Rivers and Andy Warhol); the financial markets at the end of the 1960s (with conceptual art); commerce at the beginning of the 1970s (with Ray Johnson and Marcel Broodthaers).
264

La patrimonialisation des jeux vidéo et de l'informatique. : Ethnographie en ligne et hors ligne d'une communauté de passionnés / Making video games and microcomputer a cultural heritage : Online and offline ethnography of a hobbyist community

Clais, Jean-Baptiste 14 October 2011 (has links)
Notre objet est une communauté de 300 à 400 passionnés-collectionneurs de vieux ordinateurs et de vieux jeux vidéo des années 1970-90, autrement appelés « vieilles machines », dispersés dans toute la France ainsi qu’en Belgique et en Suisse. Cette communauté est organisée en premier lieu par des forums sur internet bien qu’émanant d’associations locales. Ces forums servent à l’échange d’informations et de matériel de collection entre passionnés. Un système de valeur riche et complexe organise les relations sociales autours de l’amour et de l’utilisation des vieilles machines, d’une volonté de partage du savoir et du rejet de la spéculation. Le partage est au cœur de l’imaginaire et des pratiques de cette communauté. Il n’est pourtant pas la règle dans les économies qui l’entourent (eBay, brocantes, sites d’enchères divers). Or à l’époque des fondateurs de la communauté vers 1998, les passionnés pouvaient alors s’approvisionner gratuitement ou presque. Ils ont donc ressenti la mise en place d’un marché extérieur comme une forme d’expropriation. Ils ont donc réorganisé les règles de vie et d’échange au sein de la communauté pour contrecarrer la hausse des prix interne que générait la hausse sur le marché extérieur. Ils ont à la fois promu la notion d’échange mutuellement profitable contre l’idée de profit, organisé un système de tabou sur les prix réel des objets, tirant parti du statut de prescripteurs. Ils ont ainsi réussi à créer une niche économique, un marché à bas prix, à l’accès fermement contrôlé mais au sein duquel, une fois intégré, après avoir construit une situation par une « carrière » chacun peut profiter d’un système d’entraide généralisée. / This work is about a community of 300 to 400 hobbyist-collectors of micro-computers and video-games from the 70’s to the 90’s which they call “vieilles machines”. They are scattered all over France, Belgium and Switzerland. This community communicates through online forums although they belong to local offline associations. These forums are mainly used to exchange objects and information among collectors. A rich and complex system of value and representations organizes the social relationships. The main points are: the love of the “vieilles machines”, the will to use them, sharing knowledge and rejection of speculation. Sharing is the very basis of the social imaginary of the community. Sharing isn’t however the rule in neighboring economic systems (eBay, garage sales other online auction websites). Yet, during the first time of the community around 1998, when these objects were only obsolescent technical rubbishes, the community members could collect for free or very few money. Thus they felt as if they have been stolen when an outside market developed and prices increased. As a reaction, they changed social norms and exchange rules inside the community in order to temper the internal increase of the prices caused by outside market’s increase. They both promoted the idea of mutually satisfactory exchange and organized a taboo on the object’s real price using the position of major online opinion leaders on their subjects. They managed to create a niche economy, a low price market in which one cannot integrate easily but in which when fully integrated, after building one’s position through a “career” one can beneficiate from an extend system of generosity and mutual aid.
265

Essais sur l'analyse économique de la négociation / Essays on the economic analysis of negotiations

Tisserand, Jean-Christian 24 November 2016 (has links)
Dans le cadre des actions en responsabilité civile, la proportion de conflits résolus par le biais d’un accord à l’amiable entre les parties reste très hétérogène à travers les différents pays. L’échec des négociations entre les parties sont sources de procès dont le coût est élevé, à la fois pour l’état mais également pour les parties impliquées dans le litige. Dans cette thèse, nous utilisons unelarge panoplie de méthodes empiriques afin d’étudier les variables susceptibles d’influencer la probabilité de conciliation entre deux parties engagées dans une action en justice. Les travaux réalisés se divisent en quatre grands thèmes. Dans un premier temps, nous réalisons une méta-analyse afin d’étudier la rationalité des individus dans l’un des jeux de négociations les plus simples : lejeu de l’ultimatum. Les résultats de notre analyse montrent que les proposants agissent de manière rationnelle et anticipent correctement le comportement des répondants qui leur font face, de manière à maximiser leur profit. Consécutivementà cela, nous réalisons une méta analyse comparative des jeux de l’ultimatum et du dictateur afin d’analyser l’hypothèse d’équité selon laquelle les offres formulées dans ces deux jeux ne sont pas significativement différentes. Notre étude permet d’établir une corrélation positive entre le niveau de développement des pays et la probabilité de rejet de cette hypothèse. Dans un troisième temps, nous nous intéressons aux variables susceptibles d’influencer la probabilité de conciliation entre deux parties impliquées dans un litige prud’homal en France. La présence d’un avocat pour le demandeur lors de la phase de conciliation ainsi que l’importance de la somme en jeu dans le litige semblent exercer une influence négative sur la probabilité de conciliation. Enfin, nous réalisons une expérience en laboratoire afin d’analyser le comportement des individus qui ne souhaitent pas négocier mais y sont tout de même contraints. Les résultats de notre expérience montrent que les sujets sont plus agressifs lorsqu’ils sont contraints à négocier. Cette agressivité se traduit par des offres moins généreuses ainsi qu’un taux de rejet plus élevé. / In civil liability actions, the proportion of cases that are settled through conciliation remains very low in some countries. Negotiation failures lead to trials, the cost of which is high for both the state and the parties involved in litigation. in this thesis, we use a wide range of empirical tools to investigate the determinants that contribute to the success or failure of settlement between two parties involved in a legal action. We contribute to this topic through four original studies. We first investigate the rationality of players in one of the most simple bargaining games : the ultimatum game. For that purpose, we perform a metaanalysis of the three last decades of experimental research. Proposers’ choices, that do no match the theoretical equilibrium of the game, are found to be rationalegiven the observed behavior of responders. Subsequently, we perform a comparative meta-analysis of the ultimatum and the dictator game to investigate the “fairness hypothesis” according to which off ers in these two games are not significantly different. We find that the more developed a country, the more likely the “fairness hypothesis” is to be rejected. In a third place, we aim to identify the forces that shape decision-making in the pretrial conciliation phase of French labor courts. The results are twofold. First, conciliation is less likely when plaintiff s are assisted by a lawyer. Second, we find that the likelihood of settlement decreases as the amount at stake increases. Finally, through an original experiment, we empirically investigate the behavior of individuals who do not want to bargain, but are forced to do so. We show that individuals who are forced to bargain make less generous offers and are less likely to conciliate.
266

Essais sur l'influence des ONG environnementales / Essays on green NGO influence

Deymier, Antoine 30 October 2017 (has links)
Cette thèse aborde la question de l’influence des ONG environnementales à l’aide de l’analyse économique. Elle étudie des situations dans lesquelles ces organisations interagissent avec d’autres acteurs dans le but d’influencer leurs décisions. Un premier chapitre s’intéresse à la concurrence entre différentes ONG pour obtenir le soutien de la population et l’attention du régulateur. Un deuxième chapitre étudie la relation entre activité des ONG et leurs couverture médiatique. Il met en avant les mécanismes de concurrence entre médias qui aboutissent sur différentes stratégies de couverture médiatique des activités des ONG suivant les médias. Le dernier chapitre porte sur la mobilisation d’activistes contre un projet public présentant des externalités environnementales. / This thesis focuses on the influence of green NGOs. It studies situations where theses organisations interact with other actors and try to change their behavior. The first chapter looks at the competition between several NGOs in order to get the attention both the population and the governement. The second chapter studies the relation between the NGO activities and their media coverage. It focuses on the media market forces which lead to differences in coverage of NGO activities. The third chapter focuses on activits mobilization against a public project with environmental externalities
267

Economies régionales et intégration C. E. C. A.

Noel, Jacqueline January 1968 (has links)
Doctorat en sciences sociales, politiques et économiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished
268

Essays in International Trade and Political Economy

Aquilante, Tommaso 28 August 2015 (has links)
This dissertation consists of three independent essays which contribute to the literatures on International Trade and Political Economy. The first essay addresses questions related to the political economy of antidumping (AD). With the remarkable falling in tariff barriers that has characterized the post-World War II period, AD has become the most used non-tariff barrier (NTB).1 Studying the use of AD is thus of great importance, also because the restrictive effects of AD measures on trade can be sizable (see for instance Ruhl, 2014). Moreover, there is an increasing concern that AD has turned to be an industrial policy tool rather than a mean that governments can use to restore the “level-playing field” (Vandenbussche and Zanardi, 2008). This worry is in line with the findings presented in the first chapter of this dissertation, Bureaucrats or Politicians? Political Parties and Antidumping in the US, which shows that the adoption of ADmeasures in the US is heavily shaped by political parties’ interests. I focus on the voting behavior of the International Trade Commission (ITC), a US quasijudicial agency composed by six non-elected commissioners who are supposed to conduct (an important part of the) AD investigations in a fair and objective manner. Using a newly collected dataset containing all ITC commissioners’ votes on AD over the period 1980-2010, I show that political parties can affect the ITC voting behavior in two ways: by selecting ITC commissioners who have a similar stance on trade policy as their own (selection effect) and by influencing them while they are in office (pressure effect). While other studies have emphasised that Congress can put pressure on the ITC, the novelty of this work is to show that this pressure is party-specific. First, I show that Democratic-appointed commissioners are systematically more protectionist than Republican-appointed ones. This effect is sizable (the probability of voting in favor of AD is at least 8 percentage points higher for Democratic-appointed commissioners) and suggests that political parties can play an important role by influencing the choice of ITC commissioners who have a similar preferences on trade. This result is insensitive to several changes in the econometric specifications and to the use of different methodologies. Moreover, commissioners’ votes on AD depend on the trade policy interests of key senators (i.e. Trade subcommittee members) in the party they are associated to.2 In particular, whether (Democratic) Republican-appointed commissioners vote in favor of AD depends crucially on whether the petitioning industry is key (in terms of employment) in the states represented by leading (Democratic) Republican senators at the time. This result is robust to several checks also holds when controlling for any unobserved time-invariant characteristic of ITC commissioners (e.g. the state of origin) that could influence their votes on AD and be correlated with the pressure variables, i.e. when commissioner fixed effects are included in the specifications. In addition, the pressure effect can actually overcome the selection effect, making a Republican-appointed commissioner more protectionist than the average Democratic-appointed one. The second essay, Internationalization and Innovation of Firms: Evidence and Policy, analyzes the link between internationalization and innovation at the firm level.3 The evidence presented Chapter 2 shows that the degrees of involvement in internationalization and innovation activities are inextricably linked. However, the European policy context seems at odds with this evidence: trade-promotion and innovation-enhancing policies are largely unrelated and often carried out through various agencies (see EIM, 2010).4 Thus, understanding the interaction between internationalization and innovation can be crucial for policy makers, especially in a world which is increasingly characterized by global value chains.5 The interplay between internationalization and innovation is investigated in a unique, representative and cross-country comparable sample of manufacturing firms with at least ten employees (EFIGE), across seven European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, UK) for the year 2008. We find that firms in the sample at hand are quite active in both innovation and internationalization: 87% of firms devote resources to R&D projects, IT solutions, or patent/design/ trademark registrations, while 77% of our firms are active in international trade, cross-border outsourcing relations, or FDI. For modes of internationalization, there is a clear ranking of associated firm performance: FDI makers show the highest productivity, followed by outsourcers and traders. Innovation differences across modes are less clear cut. Moreover, defining internationalization (innovation) intensity as the number of internationalization (innovation) modes in which firms are involved, we show that firms with high innovation intensity tend also to show high internationalization intensity. Instrumenting innovation intensity by the share of firms that have benefitted from R&D financial incentives in a given (NACE 2 digits) industry-country pair and by the share of investment in R&D over the value added in the same industry-country pair, for the years 2002-2006, we are not able to find conclusive evidence of a causal effect of innovation on internationalization. Finally, a positive association between innovation and internationalization intensities appears at both firm level and country-industry (milieu) level, and at country level when average intensity is calculated disregarding the relative numbers of firms in the different industries. If country average intensities are computed weighting by firm numbers in the various industries, the correlation between innovation and internationalization intensities across countries appears weaker, suggesting that innovation matters more than internationalization for driving differences across countries. Based on the evidence we collected, we suggest a higher coordination/integration of internationalization and innovation policies at both the national and EU levels, and propose a bigger coordinating role for EU institutions, in order to reduce the current paradox of generally uncorrelated policies aimed at mostly correlated outcomes. The third essay, Cooperation Among Criminal Organizations: Evidence from Organized Crime in Italy, uncovers new facts about the behavior criminal organizations on the Italian territory. Since Becker (1968) the economic analysis of crime has especially focused on the behavior of individual offenders. Much less attention has been devoted to the activities of criminal organizations, especially from an empirical point of view. Nevertheless, organized crime is a prominent and alarming presence in the world economy: it destroys physical and human capital and deteriorates the business environment, ultimately lowering the growth potential of an economy (Acconcia et al. 2014; Pinotti, 2015). The third chapter of this dissertation contributes to the literature on economics of organized crime by shedding light on the interaction between domestic and foreign organizations in Italy, showing that the probability of cooperation among them depends both on the type of crime committed and on the presence of traditional (incumbent) organizations in some regions of the country. More specifically, cooperation between domestic and foreign criminal organizations is studied using a novel dataset containing information on their activities in the Italian territory during 2007-2010. Italian territory during 2007-2010. We first show that cooperation among Italians and foreigners is skewed towards specific crimes (e.g. counterfeiting activities). We then show that the presence of traditional (incumbent) organizations in some regions reduces the probability of cooperating. Interestingly, in these areas the same probability is higher when cooperation takes place for criminal activities in which foreign organizations can play an important role in providing inputs. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished
269

Essays on the electricity sector in developing countries / Essais sur le secteur electrique dans les pays en voie de developpement

Camos-Daurella, Daniel 16 July 2015 (has links)
This thesis focuses on the electricity sector in developing economies. This is an important sector given the well-documented contribution of high quality electricity services to economic growth and social welfare. Yet, today, 1.2 billion people worldwide lack access to electricity - half of them in sub-Saharan Africa. The sector is characterized by the high cost of electricity investments combined with the tight fiscal constraints often faced by developing countries' governments. In this context, many electricity utilities around the world either do not perform satisfactorily or operate under severe financial stress. In order to improve the performance of the electricity sector, policy makers need to prioritize among competing objectives and identify the most relevant tools. The first chapter is called "Procuring the right supervisors for infrastructure investments in developing countries". It fits into the set of challenges regarding access that regulatory choices available to policy makers can address. This chapter focuses on a possible way to increase the efficiency of infrastructure investments financed by international financial institutions (IFI) in poor governance countries that has been under studied in the past: the role of supervision consultants, who typically supervise the performance of a contractor firm building the actual infrastructure on behalf of a principal such as the Ministry of Works. I argue that the incentive remuneration of supervisors - understood as a combination of a threat of non-payment and reputation to obtain future contracts - is exogenous to the quality of governance of the country of work. I then apply this exogeneity to the classical Laffont-Tirole (1991) three-tier principal-agent with supervisor setting. I find that the induced contractor's power of incentives of their seminal model change: if the supervisor's incentive remuneration is high enough, effort is optimal; if it decreases, then the effort is sub-optimal but capture is avoided; and if the remuneration decreases even further, then the supervisor is always captured. I then suggest that IFIs could enhance efficiency of infrastructure invesmtents by (i) linking the resources allocated to monitor projects with the corruptibility of the country, and (ii) adding the corruptibility of the country in which the supervisor has successfully conducted previous assignments as a selection criteria when procuring new supervisors. The second chapter is called "Does size matter for performance? Evidence from Brazilian electricity distribution utilities". It fits into the set of challenges regarding affordability that market structure choices available to policy makers can address. In this chapter, I study the relationship between the size and the evolution of total factor productivity in 33 Brazilian electricity distribution utilities (both public and private) representing 97% of the market. This is of particular interest at this point in time given that the renewal of many concessions of utilities is set to start in 2015. I use an input distance function in a stochastic frontier analysis framework with 2 outputs (number of connections and electricity sold) and 3 inputs (operational expenses, length of the network, and capacity of transformers). I apply this methodology to a database spanning from 2003 to 2012 and then decompose the productivity into various components, paying a particular attention to the effect of firm size on productivity. I find that while large utilities are at the minimum efficient scale, the others are slowly moving towards that point. In addition, I find that, when grouping utilities according to size categories, the scale component of technical change explains an important part of the TFP changes. Brazilian policy makers and the regulator would lose an opportunity if they did not consider these findings in the imminent renewal of concessions. The third and last chapter is called "When and how does rural electrification increase labor supply?" and is co-authored with Christian Lehmann. It fits into the set of challenges regarding access and growth that technology choices available to policy makers can address. This chapter is motivated by the expanding empirical literature studying the effects of rural electrification in developing countries that has emerged in the last few years. It focuses on the effect of rural electrification on the labor markets. While the literature tends to agree that labor supply increases with electrification, the underlying mechanisms through which this happens are not well documented: while some authors argue that it is the external market labor supply that goes up, others claim that it is the in-house labor supply of marketable goods that increases. We develop a household model that provides a theoretical framework to integrate the results of most existing empirical studies and explain the theoretical mechanisms behind them. Our model has three types of goods to which the household can allocate its labor: a subsistence good, an informal good, and a formal good. We find that, depending on a number of parameters, electrification increases labor supply either through more labor provided to the market or through more labor devoted to home production of tradable goods. This result is in line with previous empirical work. We also find that the effect of electrification is heterogeneous across households and deduce a number of predictions that, to the best of our knowledge, have not been tested by the empirical literature yet. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished
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The Exploitation of Economic Leverage in Conflict Protraction :modes and aims. The cases of South Ossetia and Abkhazia (1992-2008)

Prelz Oltramonti, Giulia 20 October 2015 (has links)
This thesis focuses on a key component of societal relations, namely the creation and exploitation of economic leverage. It explores how, in the context of protracted territorial conflicts, relevant actors craft it and use it. Finally, it examines to what ends economic leverage is exploited, if at all. Generally, economic leverage can translate into a considerable form of power. This thesis scrutinizes how this occurs in more specific contexts post-ceasefire agreement conflict protraction, and what the finalities of the actors concerned are. It does so by focusing on a number of relevant actors, and by treating conflict protraction as the specific context in which economic power is exploited. Two cases are examined, namely those of the South Ossetian and the Abkhaz protracted conflicts. This thesis does not focus on the historical conditions and political events that caused the separatist conflicts in Georgia, but on their consequences and on the periods following the ceasefire agreements (signed respectively in 1992 and 1993), which came to a close with the Russo-Georgian war over South Ossetia in August 2008. / Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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