Tournament theory shows that a firm may motivate employees by running competitors for rewards either for a group or individualistic schemes. The empirical literature on Tournaments has been grown. However, many studies use no appropriate data. This paper provides the first empirical evidence on three key assumptions in these models using a special case surrounding the incentives for workers in public sector. The dataset contains information from the Coordenacao de Fiscalizacao (i.e., the Inspections Division) of the Secretaria da Receita Federal (SRF) on the bonus program created by the Brazilian government to compensate tax officials for their efforts in collecting taxes and uncovering tax violations. We constructed a larger unbalanced panel data Tax collection containing information upon 110 tax agencies distributed between 10 regions and 45 time period by month, which allowed us to support the predictions raised above. In order to examine the tournaments predictions we emphasize the dynamic of the process taking into account the unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity problems using appropriate GMM techniques. This enable us to pondered the possible inertia for time adjustments within tax agency, possibly in determining strategies to improve the tax agency performance on the sources most valuable for collection, which supports the hypothesis of learning by doing. The results also demonstrated evidence to support the following tournaments hypothesis: (1) prizes motivate agents to exert effort; (2) number of participants increased as the size of the prize increase; (3) differential in wages and bonus directly affect workers incentives.

La tesis consta de dos partes. En la primera parte se analiza la relación entre las fricciones en los flujos de información que llegan a la empresa y la persistencia del patrón de la inflación. En particular, se presenta un nuevo estimador por el modelo de Makiw y Reis (2002) "Sticky Information Phillips Curve", y se aplica usando datos trimestrales de EE.UU. El resultado principal es que el modelo tan solo puede explicar la persistencia de la inflación asumiendo que la variancia de la inflación sea mucho mas grande de la que observamos o, equivalentemente, que el modelo no puede explicar conjuntamente la variancia y la persistencia de la inflación.En la segunda parte se presentan nuevas evidencias sobre la publicidad agregada en EE.UU. y se estudian los efectos de la publicidad en la economía usando un modelo dinámico estocástico de equilibrio general. En particular, el capitulo 2 se enfoca en las relaciones de corto plazo entre las mas comunes variables macroeconómicas - consumo agregado, producto interno bruto, totalidad de horas trabajadas en la economía - y la publicidad agregada, con particular atención a la relación de causalidad entre publicidad y consumo. En cambio, el capitulo 3 se enfoca sobre las relaciones de largo plazo, enseñando como la publicidad agregada afecte el nivel de trabajo de la economía. A través del modelo presentado en el capitulo 2, se demuestra que un mayor nivel de publicidad implica un mayor números de oras trabajadas asociadas con un menor nivel de bienestar por los consumidores. / This thesis is organized in two parts. In the first one, I seek to understand the relationship between frictions in information flows among firms and inflation persistence. To this end, I present a novel estimator for the Sticky Information Phillips Curve (Mankiw and Reis, 2002), and I use it to estimate this model with U.S. postwar data. The main result is that the Sticky Information Phillips Curve can match inflation persistence only at the cost of mispredicting inflation variance. I conclude that the Sticky Information Phillips Curve is a valid model to explain inflation persistence but not an overall valid theory of inflation. The second part presents new evidence about aggregate advertising expenditures in U.S., and analyzes the effect of advertising in the aggregate economy by the mean of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. Chapter 2 focuses on the short run impact of advertising on the aggregate dynamics, and shows that an increase in aggregate advertising significantly increases the aggregate consumption. Chapter 3 focuses on the long run effects of advertising on the labor supply, showing that in economies where aggregate advertising is higher, agents supply more hours of works and are generally worse off in terms of welfare.

The present study aims to deliberate over a wider perspective on the topic of physical currency, assuming the global conversion to digital payment instruments affecting stakeholders at different scales alters number of aspects. The theoretical section discusses the process of transition to cashless society by identifying transformation stages and the barriers faced to undertake the shift. Subsequently, the links between factors as business environment, globalization, and shadow economy in relation to physical currency in circulation are examined by static and dynamic panel data analyses applying annual panel data for 70 countries for the period from 2013 to 2017. The conclusive inference is formulated based on outputs from the Blundell-Bond (1998) system GMM estimator. The empirical results provide significant evidence on negative relationship between business environment and physical currency in circulation and contrary positive link for shadow economy. Further, the greater impact of business environment on physical money among variables included, implies the promotion of electronic money solutions solely to be not sufficient to transit to cashless economy. We also construct transformation score ranking for the last five years to snap the transit stage among countries included in the study with...

The study aims to investigate the impact of natural resource wealth on the shadow economy. The theoretical section provides the basis of understanding the nature of two phenomena and discusses the possible transmission channels through which natural resources might influence the shadow economy. Consequently, the key determinants of the shadow economy are examined by static and dynamic models. Natural resource abundance is proxied by natural resource rents. We employ a panel data set for 109 countries for the period from 1996 to 2006. The results reveal that resource wealth is associated with the decrease of the shadow economy. This result is robust for different resource types (durable and non-durable), and the effect is more profound for countries with a low income level. JEL Classification C33, E26, O13 Keywords natural resources, shadow economy, dynamic panel data models, system GMM estimator Title Natural Resource Curse and Shadow Economy: Empirical Evidence

La diseguaglianza dei redditi è comunemente analizzata e misurata attraverso l’impiego di varie misure quali l’indice di Gini, il coefficiente di variazione, l’indice di Theil, la varianza dei logaritmi ed altri ancora (Sen, 1970). A partire dagli anni ’90 l’applicazione di tecniche di scomposizione relative, ad esempio, all’indice di Theil hanno reso possibile quantificare due diverse componenti della diseguaglianza ovvero la disuguaglianza legata allo sforzo individuale e la disuguaglianza dovuta alle ineguali opportunità. Questa seconda componente dipende esclusivamente da fattori esogeni, non controllabili dall’individuo, e, per questa ragione, è a ragione considerata una diseguaglianza “ingiusta”. Alla componente residua della scomposizione è di solito attribuito, invece, il significato di disuguaglianza nello sforzo, ovvero quanto ciascun individuo si è impegnato per raggiungere un determinato obiettivo di successo economico. L’applicazione di questo approccio alle misure di diseguaglianza ha permesso di studiare quale tipo di disuguaglianza prevalga all’interno di un Paese e, soprattutto, quali siano le circostanze esogene che incrementano la disparità nelle opportunità. Il presente lavoro si muove lungo questa linea di ricerca proponendo un metodo per testare il peso relativo delle due componenti e la loro significativita’. Come misura di diseguaglianza si e’ scelto di considerare il coefficiente di variazione in modo da ricondurre il test ad un problema di Analisi della varianza (ANOVA) a piu’ vie. Il test viene presentato facendo riferimento ai dati dell’ISTAT e dell'indagine Bankitalia sui redditi delle famiglie. Dopo quest'analisi preliminare sulle determinanti della diseguaglianza di opportunità in Italia, si utilizza la scomposizione della diseguaglianza nelle sue due componenti: diseguaglianza di opportunità e diseguaglianza legata all'impegno, per definire univocamente l'effetto della diseguaglianza sulla crescita economica. L'analisi econometria è svolta sui dati dell'indagine sulla ricchezza e sui redditi delle famiglie forniti dalla Banca d'Italia. L'effetto viene stimato utilizzando il modello panel dinamico con il metodo di stima GMM. / While the analysis of inequality has been central to economic studies for cen- turies, in recent years many studies concentrated on the distinction between in- equality of opportunity (IO) and inequality of returns to effort (IE) and attempted empirical estimates of the two components, e.g. in US and in Europe. The decompo- sition of a general inequality index into these two components allows to analyze the prevalence of fair or unfair income inequality within a country. This paper suggests to test the differences between the two sources of inequality in a simple way using the ANOVA framework adapted to decompose the coefficient of variation, to better suit the requirements of an inequality index. The proposed procedure is applied to the Italian Survey on Income and Living Condition (IT-SILC data, wave 2005 and 2011). The analysis of the results help identifying the circumstances that foster the rise of inequality of opportunities in Italy. Our analysis shows in particular, that father education, region of residence and gender result as the most relevant circumstances determining inequality of opportunity. On the other side, the role of mother education starting from a lower level, as an inequality of opportunity factor, is increasing its influence over time. The decomposition of inequality index in two components allows not only to analyze the prevalence of fair or unfair income inequality in a country, but also to find a clearer relation between inequality and growth. In fact, it is still missing an analysis of the relation between inequality of opportunity and economic growth in Italy. This paper aims at filling in that gap, by using Italian data from Bank of Italys Survey on Income and Wealth from 1998 to 2014. We choose the coefficient of variation to measure inequality of opportunity at the regional level and, then, we studied its relation with economic growth using Dynamic Panel Data models estimated through System- GMM. Finally, in order to check if the coefficient of variation could be a measure as good as the Entropy’s index, I will compare the results of the estimated panel models with the two different inequality of opportunity indeces. We evaluate the effect of inequality of opportunity on different length of the economic growth rate, going from a short term (2 years) to a very long term growth rate (10 years). Our results shows that, in Italy, inequality of opportunity is negative in the short period, but it does not have any effect on long run growth.