la tesi si divide in tre parti. La prima parte ripercorre l'evoluzione storica della PAC. La seconda è un'analisi econometrica delle riforme McSharry e Fischler mentre la terza è un'analisi del processo di riforma attuale / Thesis is divided in three parts. The first one is an historical illustration of the CAP in its "price support" period. The second is an econometric analysis of the effectiveness of the McSharry and Fischler's reforms. The third is an anakys of the current reform process

Il primo Capitolo trae origine dall’evidenza dello scarso rendimento scolastico dei bambini che vivono nelle case popolari italiane. Gli obiettivi di questo paper sono due: uno è di verificare l’esistenza di un effetto “ghetto” tra pari, l’altro è di verificare l’esistenza di un effetto “ghetto” crescente (nella dimensione della casa popolare) e/o l’esistenza di effetto “struttura” (“casermoni”). L’analisi suggerisce un effetto causale sfavorevole delle case popolari sull’evasione scolastica delle ragazze e un effetto sfavorevole dei “casermoni” sulla bocciatura, per le ragazze che vivono nelle grandi città. Per le altre variabili educative la difficoltà di isolare l’effetto dell’ambiente familiare non permette di trarre delle considerazioni conclusive. Il contributo del secondo Capitolo è di investigare se la diversità etnica delle scuole ha un impatto sui voti dei bambini e per chi è importante. Proviamo anche a chiarire quali meccanismi possono esserci dietro. Usiamo un ricco data-set sull’istruzione primaria nei Paesi Bassi. Troviamo che la diversità etnica ha un impatto positivo sui voti degli studenti della minoranze etniche, specialmente per i voti nelle abilità linguistiche e per gli studenti più grandi. Troviamo anche una relazione negativa tra la diversità etnica e l’ambiente sociale della scuola, che può parzialmente spiegare l’incremento nei voti come il risultato di un ambiente più competitivo. Nel 2005 l’Italia lanciò un’importante politica di promozione per incentivare le iscrizioni a particolari corsi di laurea scientifici. L’obiettivo del terzo Capitolo è di valutare l’efficacia di questa politica. Inoltre, controlliamo se la policy è stata efficace sia per i maschi che per le femmine. Infine, controlliamo se il programma ha generato effetti al di fuori della portata della policy. I risultati mostrano un effetto positivo e significativo della politica “Progetto Lauree Scientifiche” sui corsi di laurea scientifici designati e non e un effetto positivo e trasversale tra le materie. Comunque, se la politica ha un considerevole impatto sulla scelta del corso di laurea per i maschi, non sembra avere alcun effetto per le femmine. / The first Chapter originates from the evidence of the low school achievement of children living in Italian public housing. The aims of this paper are two: one is to verify the existence of a "ghetto" peer effect, the other is to verify the existence of an increasing "ghetto" effect (in the size of the project) and/or the existence of an amenity effect (high-rise projects). The analysis suggests an unfavorable causal effect of public housing on school evasion for girls and an unfavorable effect of high-rise projects on grade repetition, for girls living in big cities. For other educational outcomes the difficulty to isolate the family background effect does not allow us to draw conclusive comments. The contribution of the second Chapter is to investigate whether the ethnic diversity of schools has an impact on the test scores of children and for whom it matters. We also try to shed some light on the mechanisms there can be behind. We use a rich data-set about primary education in the Netherlands. We find that ethnic diversity has a positive impact on the test scores of minority students, especially for language skills and older students. We also find a negative relationship between ethnic diversity and school's social environment, that can partly explain the gains in test scores as a result of a more competitive environment. In 2005, Italy launched an important promotion policy to boost enrolments in selected scientific bachelors. The aim of the third Chapter is to evaluate the efficacy of this policy. Moreover, we check whether the policy has been effective for both males and females. Finally, we check whether the program generates effects outside the scope of the policy. The results show a positive and significant effect of the policy "Progetto Lauree Scientifiche" on targeted and non targeted scientific bachelors and positive cross treatment effects across subjects. However, if the policy has a considerable impact on the bachelor's choice for males, it does not appear to have any effect for females.

The existence and the direction of labor market effects of migration has been subject to long and extensive debates among both economists and policy makers. This study provides a theoretical rationale as well as empirical evidence for the existence of welfare-improving migration outcomes. The first paper examines how emigration affects labor markets in migrant-sending countries. Following EU enlargement in 2004, Central and Eastern Europe experienced large waves of emigration. Given the magnitude and the speed of migration flows, I explore to what extend the migration waves had an impact on the distribution of wages, employment opportunities and the structure of production in migrant-sending countries. The second paper contributes to the debate about economic determinants of international migration flows and the consequential effects of migration on wages and unemployment rates. The analysis is carried out within a two-country model that belongs to a general family of search-and-matching models (e.g., Diamond, 1982 and Mortensen and Pissarides, 1994). The central idea of this setting is that both firms (labor demand side) and workers (labor supply side) have to spend resources before job creation and production can take place. A larger number of unemployed workers searching for a job makes it relatively cheaper for a firm to create a new vacancy. An increase in the number of vacancies, in turn, strengthens the bargaining position of unemployed workers. Therefore, immigration does not necessarily lead to a dramatic reduction of wages and increased unemployment, as in a Walrasian paradigm. I show that under the search and matching framework a broad range of possible migration effects can be generated. This is in line with the mixed evidence provided by the empirical literature, which documents that the impact of migration on labor markets varies with time and location, and that it can be either positive or negative. In order to provide a theoretical rationale for the existence of diverse effects of migration on wages and unemployment, I develop two models with fully integrated migration decisions and non-linear costs of migration. This last paper presents an application of the theoretical framework developed above to the migration between Switzerland and the EU. Migration effects on the Swiss labor market are derived. In order to obtain structural parameters characterising the Swiss labor market, I first calibrate the standard one-country search model to generate the observed fluctuations in unemployment and job vacancies in Switzerland. I then use the parameters obtained from calibration for simulating the steady state versions of two two-country models for Switzerland and the EU. The results show, that the models can adequately predict observed percentage changes in unemployment rates in response to the immigration wave and resulting wage differences between immigrants and native workers.

There is an on-going debate on the effects of participatory development interventions; some scholars claim that participation is the key driver of change while others show that these interventions are vulnerable to unintended consequences and often only empower the already leading elites. The Brazilian agrarian reform created a large migration flow into villages inside sugar cane plantations (engenhos) that became agrarian reform settlements (assentamentos). The main novelties in assentamentos are the presence of households with heterogeneous background and free use of land. The main question is whether the agrarian reform and producers’ cooperatives supported the emergence in assentamentos of new forms of social organization. This research argues that that impact of development intervention is not only related to participants but to the entire target social structure. Applying theory of adaptiveness, the main hypothesis is that the capacity of assentamentos to respond to the changes promoted by these external interventions depends on the level of overlap between multiple social networks that define the social structure of assentamentos. This research explores qualitatively and quantitatively the network formation of three assentamentos in Northeast Brazil. Furthermore it analyzes how one cooperative supporting family farming influences and it is influenced by the social network structure. The agrarian reform and the creation of a producers’ cooperative can be considered as participatory interventions, as they were community driven. The unit of analysis is the household. Households are the nodes in the network. Villages are considered as social relational systems. The analysis focuses on the study of multiple networks that connect households in each village. By analyzing three agrarian reform settlements that were created by three different social movements, the research shows that different households’ recruitment strategies and different villages’ histories led to different village composition and social processes behind network formation. Family farming plays a crucial role in allowing for the possibility to create new rural villages that differ from previous sugar cane plantation production units. The possibility of family farming to become a relevant livelihood strategy is associated with the features of villages’ social networks. The producers’ cooperative, supporting the introduction of new labor-intensive crops and guaranteeing a market for some crops, sustains family farming employment network. However the brokering role of the cooperative is hampered by the cooperative political positioning and by the path of specialization towards high value and labor-intensive crops.

According to the 2017 World Economic Forum, the factors that pose a serious risk to today’s global economy are rising inequality and the polarization of societies, which in turn threat the social cohesion. This doctoral dissertation contributes to the understanding of these major current challenges, by investigating the ex- tend of unequal access to opportunity in education and in the labour market in the former communist countries; the potential of diversity in the South African multi- cultural society in terms of employment; the formation of interpersonal trust at the individual level in Germany.

The creation and support of an ecosystem of social incubators has been analysed in organizational research with regards to business models, services provided and financial performances’ evaluation (Giordano et al., 2015). How these ecosystems are created, the peculiarity of third sector as well as the role of social innovation is a debated topic in social economy. Social incubators are substantially different from the technological incubators for motivations, relations and processes of the firms and actors involved. They are intrinsically bonded to the local systems where they are usually established by virtue of local institutions. However, the local impacts of these new typology of organizations have not yet been systematically investigated, leaving the topic uncovered by economic geography. Social incubators are located in cities, close or incorporated into knowledge hubs such as universities or in zones with relevant level of inequalities, for developing innovations answering local social needs, engineering social innovation. Community social networks are reproduced to satisfy human needs and social empowerment, their relationship being explained by the geographical perspective of social innovation (Van Dyck and Van den Broeck, 2013). Despite its recognized key role in development, geography approach to social innovation still remain extremely vague (Van Dyck and Van den Broeck, 2013). The objective of this dissertation is to provide a first set of answers to that gap involving the urban environment of the city of Milan and a subsequent comparative case strategy with incubators in Brussels.

This dissertation investigates the way in which potential and actual shocks influence economic conditions and choices of the Indonesian rural households. The analysis focuses on three main issues. First, we explore which strategies are chosen for different types of shocks. Second, we investigate which are the specific mechanisms adopted in the face of the most common shock (crop loss), and the consequences on consumption. Finally, we analyze the consequences of risk and shocks on a particularly important household decision: how much to invest in children education. Three sets of main conclusions emerge from this dissertation. First, we have learned that when facing a shock, households choose risk coping strategies by comparing responses with each other rather than with a common benchmark. In such a situation of non-exclusive and dependent multiple responses, the widely used Marginal Logit Model (MLM) suffers from a number of limitations. The two models we developed to take into account these specificities appear to outperform the MLM in describing these type of choices. The second main conclusion relates to the evidence that the choices between different coping strategies markedly differ between poor and non-poor households. In the face of shocks, the former appear to behave in a very different way. In general, rich households smooth consumption relative to income, whereas the need to accumulate savings to both build a buffer stock of assets and self-finance profitable investments leads poor people to rely more on ex post income smoothing strategies (taking an extra job) and to use part of this extra labour income to preserve their level of assets, even reducing consumption if necessary. Finally, it is necessary to deepen our knowledge of the long-run consequences of shocks, particularly with respect to the human capital formation of children. We found that the impact of uncertainty on schooling decisions is more subtle than suggested by much of the existing development literature. Taking into account that withdrawal from school is an absorbing state, that is children cannot re-enroll once they stop going to school, temporary interruptions in child schooling have long term impacts on the child human capital. Given irreversibility of withdrawal from school, in the face of household income variability parents are more likely to send children to school to give them the option to continue with higher schooling levels in the future (and hence earn higher earnings when they become adults).

Among the advantages of belonging to successful local systems like clusters, the regional economic literature has stressed the critical role played by localized knowledge. For some time, scholars have been arguing that knowledge spreads unevenly among local actors, rather than pervasively and widely, but, its drivers, underlying social structure, and evolution over time remain poorly understood. Particularly, on the one hand, heterogeneity of firms and the way they are perceived are fundamental features to understand evolutionary patterns of clustered firms acting in a world of uncertainty and imperfect information; on the other hand, different ties among the same set of actors simultaneously diffuse specific knowledge. This PhD thesis aims to go deeper in this debate investigating a framework to study local development in relation to architectures and dynamics of local systems and focussing on a network perspective; particularly, stressing the role of both individual heterogeneity and relational multiplicity; testing the efficacy of the identified framework within the same industry, but, with two different and original databases; implementing two different methodologies of social network analysis for the study of knowledge network structures and dynamics (Exponential Random Graph Models and Stochastic Actors Oriented Models); and identifying a few policy implications. To organically achieve these aims, the thesis aims to answer the following general research questions: What is the state of the art of knowledge networks within local systems? To what extent do multiple ties as different relational sets through which knowledge diffuses impact on the local exchange of knowledge? To what extent does status as the perceived relative qualities of a firm in a given market or organizational field affect knowledge network evolution over time? To answer these questions, the first chapter “Knowledge Networks within Local Systems. Their Structures and Dynamics” provides a literature review on knowledge network structures and dynamics within local systems and it offers an original explanation of local systems evolution with a knowledge network perspective. The second chapter “Complementary Inter-Firm Relations of Multiple Knowledge Networks in Industrial Clusters: Evidence from a Growing Wine Cluster in Italy” shows that different kinds of relationships positively impact on the spread of technical knowledge, but they are different in magnitude and they follow complementary patterns rather than substitutive ones. The third chapter “Status and the Assortative Dynamics of Knowledge Networks in Industrial Clusters: Evidence from a Successful Wine Cluster in Italy” shows the presence of an assortative network change, where high-status firms are more likely to interact with other high-status firms but not with low-status firms (and vice-versa). Finally, the last part concludes with a summary of the main findings and it offers a few possible policy implications. Also, the main limitations of the study as well as a few future possible extensions are discussed.

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.

The research project intends to investigate the issue of health care accessibility with respect to financial obstacles focusing on the case study of Uganda, where impoverishing effects due to health services utilisation are critical for the population well-being. The thesis consists of three independent chapters aimed to examine multiple aspects which are relevant for health coverage and financial protection. In the first chapter, a political economy perspective is adopted to analyse the country experience of health financing reforms for Universal Health Coverage through a desk review and Key Informant Interviews. In the second chapter, household data from a rural district are employed to explore how the provision of social support through social networks operates at the behavioural level for overcoming barriers to health care utilisation and coping with financial hardship due to health expenditures. The analysis presented in the third chapter relies on a longitudinal household survey to assess the impact of a Community Health Financing pilot program on health expenditures and coping strategies. Overall, the thesis can contribute to the current debate on health coverage in Low- and Middle-Income Countries. On one side, the new evidence based on the collection of primary data and the adoption of innovative methodologies allows to advance the academic knowledge on financial protection. On the other side, the main research findings have the potential to inform policy design and policy making to effectively improve health coverage outcomes in informal settings.