TThis thesis sheds light on the multidimensional development experienced by China in the last decades, investigating to which extent different regions and segments of the society have benefitted from this process. The thesis comprises three independent chapters, each of which addresses this issue from a different angle and with different methodologies. The purpose of the first chapter is to document and analyze the trend and distribution of income, education and nutrition of Chinese individuals between 1989 and 2011. These three dimensions are analyzed separately (dashboard approach) through similar techniques, to preserve the possibility to compare the results of different dimensions. The inequalities observed in the three variables are measured with the Gini index, and are associated to the policies of the government and other explanatory variables. Moreover, the first chapter investigates how each type of inequality is related to the inequality of opportunities, and how the different types of discrimination evolved over time. The discrimination of individuals based on their circumstances (inequality of opportunities) is measured over time with a regression-based decomposition of inequalities. Income, education and nutrition inequalities show different trends, leading to dimension-specific policy implications. The purpose of the second chapter is to measure the Chinese poverty reduction in the multidimensional space and to individuate an informative index of multidimensional deprivation. Two alternative methodologies, the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and the Multidimensional Synthesis Indicator (MSI), are adopted and compared, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of both indexes. Moreover, an original version of the MSI index is introduced, consistently with the idea of income as a mean, not an end, to achieve well-being. The multidimensional inequality amongst different groups of Chinese people is analyzed through these techniques, which are computed based on CHNS objective data, but result significantly correlated with subjective well-being too. The results, generally consistent with the previous MPI literature, contains also original findings about the intra-household identification of multidimensional deprivation. The purpose of the third chapter is to measure the multidimensional development and convergence of Chinese provinces with composite indexes. The introduction of several MSI indexes of development, based on ten economic and social indicators of development, allows to identify the development trajectory of all the 31 provinces of China between 1993 and 2016. The effectiveness of “harmonious society” policies is investigated in terms of achievements of synergies between social and economic achievements and in terms of convergence amongst provinces, according to the β- and σ-convergence methods. Both multidimensional development and convergence are characterized by generally positive results during the “harmonious society” period; however, inequalities across provinces remains, and interventions to recover the level and distribution of specific dimensions are needed. The results of the three chapters are consistent in highlighting that Chinese reforms have different effects in terms of income and multidimensional well-being. Moreover, the thesis generally points to an improvement of Chinese conditions (despite multidimensional indexes grow more slowly than income) that has been achieved also thanks to the efforts of the central government in pursuing a more balanced and harmonious development strategy. The thesis also indicates which dimensions and regions remain more fragile, providing a possible framework to design anti-poverty policy interventions. The diffusion of multidimensional indexes in future researches about Chinese development could allow to evaluate the trajectory of future reforms, preventing the repetition of unbalanced development strategies.

The dissertation is aimed at offering an insight into the agent-based methodology and its possible application to the macroeconomic analysis. Relying on this methodology, I deal with three different issues concerning heterogeneity of economic agents, bounded rationality and interaction. Specifically, the first chapter is devoted to describe the distinctive characteristics of agent-based economics and its advantages-disadvantages. In the second chapter I propose a credit market framework characterized by the presence of asymmetric information between the banks and the entrepreneurs. I analyze how entrepreneursâ€TM heterogeneity and the presence of Relationship Banking influences the macro properties of the designed system. In the third chapter I work to take the core of Keynesâ€TMs macroeconomics into the computer laboratory, in the spirit of a counterfactual history of economic thought. In particular, I devote much effort in the behavioural characterization of the three pillars of Keynesâ€TMs economics – namely the MEC, MPC and LP – relying on his clear refusal of perfect rationality in the decision making process. The last chapter adds to the literature that assesses the impact of monetary policy under the hypothesis of agentâ€TMs bounded rationality. Indeed, I design a quasi rational process through which inflation expectations are updated, and then I analyze how this hypothesis interacts with the efficacy of different monetary policy regimes.

The objective of this thesis is to analyse the promotive, preventive and transformative role of a conditional cash transfer programme in Peru. In particular, we analyse the unintended impact of Juntos on risk-coping strategies (migration and assets accumulation) and aspirations. Since the way risk-coping strategies and aspirations are formed may determine important consequences in terms of poverty, it is relevant to analyse to what extent conditional cash transfers may affect these dimensions. This thesis shows that the Juntos programme is able, not only to deter domestic migration from rural to urban areas, but also to allow beneficiary households to invest in productive assets and activities used for income generating activities. Additionally, the programme has also a psychological effect on beneficiary children who have higher aspirations about their future studies and work.

This dissertation seeks to contribute to the ongoing debate on the variety of post-socialist developmental trajectories by analyzing specific country cases and factors. The origins of distinct development paths are traced to early policy decisions, formation of tax regimes, and the shifting balance between demand for, and supply of, redistribution. An important feature of the transition economies is the varying propensity of policy-makers to control the speed of market reforms. Policy discretion has been restricted by self-imposed economic transnationalization, i.e., the opening of the financial and production sectors to the penetration of foreign capital. Post-socialist economies have varied with respect to the timing of their transnationalization and to the strength of the associated monetary and financial discipline, which have far-reaching implications for their competitiveness. The examination of existing cases of delayed reforms, such as in Belarus, further uncovers the nuances of formation of divergent post-socialist trajectories. This process is riddled with an inescapable conflict between backward and advanced sectors. Domestic social forces are often unable to reach a negotiated, consensual solution to this conflict, thus opening an avenue for transnationalization. If this conflict is left unresolved, dual economies tend to emerge, and are characterized by the coexistence of a sector of subsidized enterprises with a sector of profit-making and more efficient companies. In order to trace the dynamics of dual economies, the dissertation develops two analytical models encapsulating the factors behind the inter-sectoral conflict and the policy instruments, including taxation and financial repression in the form of directed lending. A continuous use of these policy instruments has clear-cut implications for investment and economic growth over the long run. A case is made to show the conditions under which dual economies are sustained over prolonged periods, but do not necessarily become more efficient and stable. The first model predicts that – ceteris paribus – the speed at which dual economies converge to the income level of the most advanced countries is reduced by the legacies of industrial employment and ideological hostilities towards reforms. The second model, which captures some important properties of the Chinese economy, demonstrates that in dual economies financial repression can lead to economic growth, but it occurs at the expense of savers’ well-being.

Humans are social animals who evolved to live in societies. They are "encultured" actors as their preferences, perceptions and values are shaped by the social context to which they are exposed. Part of economic failures is due to suboptimal social contexts which determine individuals' decisions. These social contexts can be better designed by organizations and governments. The ultimate goal of this research is to emphasize that social context can be detrimental for individual decisions, providing empirically-based behavioral insights for policy makers who wish to implement regulatory policies on corruption, gender gap and injustice. Behavioral and Experimental Economics provides a clean tool to keep the internal validity necessary to disentangle complex behavioral aspects that cannot be easily observed in the field, such as those related to the influence of social environment. This Doctoral Thesis is a collection of three laboratory experimental essays about the interplay between suboptimal social contexts and decisions. The first Chapter investigates the role of group identity in unethical decisions motivated by unfairness. The second Chapter provides evidence of gender stereotype in perceptions of others'risk attitudes. The third Chapter shows that small contextual changes can promote the diffusion of corruption while others inhibit it.

Keynesian economics has devoted particular attention to out of full employment equilibrium phenomena, but the lack of an analytical framework for describing how economic agents interact and organize their production and consumption decisions has made it difficult to establish whether the economic system is self-adjusting at an out-of-full employment equilibrium. One of the purposes of Sraffa's book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities was to understand the conditions that allow the system to reproduce itself. But how trade takes place remains an open question. For Sraffian economics, the lack of an analytical framework for describing how economic agents interact and organize their production and consumption decisions, has made it difficult to consider out-of-equilibrium behaviour. The present thesis is a first attempt to model Keynes's principle of effective demand with the aid of Sraffian schemes. The notion of effective demand requires the possibility for buyers and sellers to buy and sell thanks to the existence of newly generated or previously accumulated financial purchasing power. Stated differently, the very notion of out-of-equilibrium exchanges may require the emergence of new credit and debt relations. Sraffa's original production schemes have been enriched with algorithmic behavioural functions that describe agent decisions and exchanges of property rights. In the resulting algorithmic model of an economic system (with labour and goods market), decisions of production and consumption are made by a population of algorithmic rational agents (ARAs), divided between producers and workers. The ARAs are characterized by behavioural functions, specific trading rules, and are connected in a network. Exchanges are made by signing virtual contracts that involve the use of financial means. The creation of new financial means of exchange, credit and debt, is endogenous. Production is heterogeneous and conceived as a circular process. The fundamental conclusion is that this digital economic laboratory has generated virtual economies able to converge towards production prices, uniform wage rates but non-uniform profit rates with an unequal distribution. The virtual economies result to be stable and efficient from a technological point of view despite economic policy can improve the performance of the whole economy. The digital economic laboratory is a powerful instrument able to answer different research questions. It represents an answer to the need to develop models able to explore the complexity of out-of-equilibrium behaviour, grounded on bookkeeping principles and computable methods.

This thesis investigates the interdependence between migration and gender dynamics, with a focus on low- and middle-income countries. The first chapter concerns intra-household bargaining and migration decision-making: considering that the decision to migrate is likely to be made within the family, the bargaining powers of household members may shape the result of the decision-making process. Given that there is evidence of women’s altruistic behaviours towards their children, I investigate how women’s bargaining power affects the decisions about the individual migrations of their young offspring, who may benefit from the change in location. A collective model of migration decision-making and an empirical analysis regarding the context of Mexico are presented. This analysis sheds the light on how empowerment may be beneficial not only to women themselves but also to their children, and suggests that policies intending to improve women’s position within the household and the whole society should also acknowledge these positive spillover effects. The second chapter regards the uncertainty over health status and the gendered determinants of migration. While several studies show a relationship between migration and health, migration selection in terms of health conditions is relatively under-investigated, as regards the context of Sub-Saharan African countries. Using panel data from a survey on young women and men living in Malawi, I assess the impact of randomised HIV testing on long- and short-term migrations, and I find that becoming certain of being HIV-negative affects the probability of both types of movements, only for women. This impact evaluation indicates that HIV testing may have gender-specific unintended consequences, which should be considered. Finally, the third chapter evaluates the impact of a randomised intervention, aiming to promote child development through improvements in parenting skills, on the empowerment of women in Bangladesh. Results show that the programme increases women’s autonomy and reduces their exclusion from decision-making processes: these effects do not concern only child-related decisions – consistent with the type of training that women in the treatment group receive – but also decisions about the allocation of resources. The empowerment effect regards only women whose partner has never migrated before the baseline, thus suggesting the existence of a relationship between women’s decision-making power and men’s migration – as found in previous studies.

Foreign Direct Investments are the most complex form of internationalization. A large part of the recent international trade literature has focused on their determinants on the ground that they spur growth and have a positive impact on development. This thesis examines FDI along two different and understudied lines. The first line of research focuses on cultural factors promoting bilateral investments flows. In chapter 1 and chapter 3, I propose a novel definition of Cultural Proximity wich separates the effect of cultural similarity from the role of perceptions and cultural affiity. I am able to innovate with respect to the existing literature by capturing the effect of time varying and possibly asymmetric patterns in the reciprocal cultural appreciation between two countries. In Chapter 1 I explicitly deal with the potential asymmetry in bilateral cultural appreciation, and test for the emergence of non reciprocal cultural patterns in the analysis of bilateral Greenfield FDI. An example clarifies what I mean: consider South Korea and Latin America. The so called Korean Wave, consisting of soap operas and Korean pop music has become extremely popular in Latin America since the mid 2000s, despite of geographic and cultural distance in terms of language and ethnicity. Yet, there is no evidence of a symmetric rise in popularity of Latin American culture in South Korea. The underlying idea is that the "new" positive perception of Korea enhances bilateral (trade and) FDI. In Chapter 3 I highlight the heterogeneity of FDI and the non-linearities that could emerge in the relationship between cultural affnity and bilateral M&A. In the empirical exercise, I use an econometric model that allows me to disentangle the impact of the different level on M&A. The second line of research explores the role of migrants' flows on bilateral FDI. Borrowing the tools from social network analysis, in Chapter 2 I investigate whether and how the position of a country in the International Migration Network affects a country's bilateral investment flows beyond the direct role of its local emi(immi)-grant population. The empirical application is on Greenfield FDI.

Humans evolved over millennia into agents that invest heavily, both directly and indirectly, in their children. Part of the investment into children is represented by contributions to long-run public goods, including the educational system, the health-care system, major infrastructures and environmental protection. Moreover, the production of some of these public goods has wide-ranging externalities to local or global communities (think of vaccination programs, for example). This Doctoral Thesis is a collection of three essays on the topic of long-run, across-the-border public goods, from the vantage point of Experimental and Behavioral Economics. The first Chapter reviews the literature up to date, re-organizing previous works on Public Good games for the benefit of explaining why intergenerational and international public goods are different from standard ones. The second and third Chapters provide empirical evidence on matters such as heterogeneity linked to seniority and dynastic membership in the provision of public goods.

In the last forty years, a considerable amount of experimental research in both psychology and economics has reported various violations of the axioms of classical choice theory, but only recently has axiomatic theory started to take into account this empirical evidence. In particular, the recent evidence collected by the new approach of neuroeconomics and the rapid growth of new teorie have triggered a methodological debate about whether and how these sources of new empirical data and psychological insights should be used in economics (Caplin and Schotter, 2008). While some authors suggest to dismiss classical revealed preference analysis arguing that the presence of systematic biases between what people like and what people choose impair the possibility to reveal something by simply observing choices (K¨oszegi and Rabin, 2008), others remain skeptical about extending the classical model to include additional components that cannot be inferred from choice data (Gul and Pesendorfer, 2008). A third group of authors proposes to use the new evidence combined with standard choice–theoretic tools to build economic models that are both more realistic and choice–based (Caplin, 2008; Rubinstein and Salant, 2008). The present work is in this spirit: on one hand it builds on empirical evidence and psychological literature on salience, bandwagon and snob effects, and heuristic behaviour; on the other hand, it adopts a choice–theoretic approach to embed these phenomena into axiomatic models. The first chapter of the thesis covers the recent methodological debate concerning classical decision theory. It briefly points out how economic theory has developed a coherent and organic framework that links together choices, utility, and preference by means of important formal results, and how some of the implicit difficulties regarding the psychological aspects have been neglected. In particular, the chapter discusses the critical assumption that choices depend only on the set of available alternatives and presents the relevant psychological literature and experimental evidence about the effect of alleged irrelevant aspects on choices, i.e., ancillary conditions (Bernheim and Rangel, 2009, p. 55). The second chapter proposes an axiomatic model where choice behaviour of the decision maker is influenced by ancillary conditions. Specifically, the present thesis extends the concept of choices with frames proposed by Bernheim and Rangel (2008, 2009) and by Salant and Rubinstein (2008) according to which choices do not simply depend upon the set of available alternatives, but also upon additional components called frames. The present work defines the abstract concept of frame as a vector of indexes representing a psychological measure that agents attach to each alternative. Choices are then conditioned to the indexes attached to the alternatives. This chapter shows that, if the conditional choice behaviour satisfies two intuitively appealing properties—namely Monotonicity and Conditional IIA—, then the observable part of choice behaviour, i.e., the unconditional choices, can be interpreted as resulting from the maximisation of a preference relation. The chapter discusses also some welfare considerations regarding the choice model and proposes some interpretations of the indexes. The third chapter considers a narrower interpretation of the indexes—each index represents the number of people in a group that choose each alternative—and discusses the properties an extended choice function should satisfy in order to capture the behavioural implications of the “DoWhat The Majority Do†heuristic (Gigerenzer, 2004). This heuristic prescribes that, whenever the choice task is too difficult, the consequences of the alternatives are too complex to evaluate, or the subject is unsure about what to choose, he simply looks at what the majority of his peers does and then engages in the same behaviour. The chapter axiomatises the contents of the “Do What The Majority Do†heuristic by using the monotoni city axiom introduced in chapter 2 together with a maximality axiom, and then shows that an equilibrium is reached if choices satisfy maximality and monotonicity. The fourth chapter presents an experimental test of the two axioms proposed in the third chapter. The test of the axioms is performed using sets of lotteries and groups of 7 people. Participants are asked to choose repeatedly from the same set of lotteries and, after each choice, they are informed about the number of people choosing each of the alternatives. The reaction to changes in the indexes—i.e., to the choices of the members of the group—is thus recorded and the robustness of the axioms is tested. Even though the results support the idea that choices are affected by what the others members of the group do, there is mixed evidence regarding the empirical validity of the two axioms. While strong support in favour of monotonicity is found, there is no clear cut evidence in support of maximality.