Lo studio presenta un analisi dettagliata sul comportamento dei giocatori d'azzardo. I dati sono stati raccolti tramite un esperimento condotto “sul campo” che ha osservato i giocatori durante la loro attività di gioco in un agenzia di scommesse. L'esperimento ha permesso di ottenere il grado di severità del disordine da gioco d’azzardo e i principali tratti comportamentali dei partecipanti. La misurazione di tali tratti ha permesso di comprendere quali tra questi, meglio prediceva l’insorgere del disordine da gioco d’azzardo. La seconda parte del lavoro è stata rivolta a studiare la possibile relazione causale tra attività di gioco e una possibile modifica dei tratti comportamentali. Inoltre la diretta osservazione dei giocatori durante l’attività di gioco ha permesso di avere una traccia dettagliata del loro comportamento di gioco. I risultati sottolineano importanti differenze tra i comportamenti dei giocatori osservati usando procedure sperimentali e i comportamenti osservati durante l’attività di gioco. Nel primo caso non è stato rilevato nessun impatto significativo sulle preferenze individuali dovuto all’attività di gioco. Nel secondo caso, invece, si trova conferma del fenomeno conosciuto come “diminishing sensitivity”. In altre parole, all’aumentare delle perdite subite durante l’attività di gioco aumenta la propensione al rischio dei giocatori. / The thesis presents a lab-in-the-field experiment collecting data on gamblers’ behaviour. The study provides an estimate of the incidence of Problematic Gambling (PG) among the usual customers of a large betting agency in Milan. We elicit in an incentivized manner a large battery of behavioural traits in order to investigate which of them are mostly characterizing PG. Moreover, we investigate a causal relationship between gambling activity and behavioural traits. We also keep detailed track of the gambling activity during the day of the interview to see which are the more interest patterns of the gambling activity. The results underline important differences between real and experimental observation. When we use experimental task to investigate a possible variation in risk preferences due to gambling activity we do not observe any significant impact on risk preferences. When we inspect risk preferences using data coming from the real gambling activity we find evidence of the diminishing sensitivity phenomenon. The more losses they have collected during gambling, the more is the risk that gamblers are likely to take in the subsequent bets. These results indicate that gamblers are not risk-seekers in general, but their risk propensity seems to rise when they are involved in gambling.

This thesis focuses on endogenous approaches to studying macroeconomic dynamics and evaluates this tradition from different perspectives. It traces the origins and development of non-linear, endogenous theories of business cycles from its early beginnings up to its present frontiers. It argues that these theories emerged out of an attempt to reconcile the then existing corpus of (essentially static) economic theory with empirically observed fluctuations. It offers a re-reading of Harrod's `The Trade Cycle' and demonstrates that the accelerator in his theory to be non-linear and consequently claims that Harrod's text contains essential elements that constitute an endogenous theory. On the mathematical front, it examines the role of existence and uniqueness theorems (in particular, the Poincare--Bendixson Theorem in planar endogenous models of economic dynamics. Their underpinnings, their use and influence on the mathematical models of aggregate macroeconomic fluctuations are critically evaluated. In this context, it considers Goodwin(1951)'s nonlinear model of business cycles and shows how existence and uniqueness of limit cycles can be established even for the case of an asymmetric, nonlinear, accelerator with only one nonlinearity. This is achieved using a result by de Figueiredo(1960). It argues that an excessive reliance on proving 'existence' and 'uniqueness' hampered the enlargement of scope of nonlinear, endogenous theories. It outlines the non-constructive aspects of these theorems and discusses the issue of computability for limit cycles in these planar models. Furthermore, some methodological issues related to computational economic dynamics are analyzed. From an algorithmic point of view, it contends that there are inherent undecidabilities associated with many important properties of these dynamic models. These include characterizing attractors, determining their number, the domains of attraction and the possibility of exhibiting chaos, all of which have been important for dynamic economic theories. It makes a case for resorting to algorithmic economic dynamics in the future in order to overcome some of the limitations faced by the endogenous tradition.

Despite the great efforts scholars have devoted to the study of migration a unified and coherent theory of international migration does not yet exist. Particularly, only in recent years, scholars have developed models of labor mobility to take into account social interaction across agents. Similarly, empirical analysis lacks an adequate approach to social interaction in migration, often using very rough measures as, for example, the stock of compatriots in the receiving country. The aim of this dissertation is to examine economic migrants decision to migrate, focusing specifically on potential migrants who can choose if and where to migrate, and which conditions facilitate their migration. It investigates how wealth, social networks and education interact in determining householdsâ€TM migration strategies and the aggregate dimension and composition of migration flows. Household income maximization strategy evaluates migration as a possible, but costly investment. In a context of underdeveloped financial and insurance markets, budget constraints play a key role in determining migration behavior. Poorer households have higher incentives, but fewer opportunities to migrate, whereas better-off households have fewer incentives, but greater possibilities of migrating. Social networks, reducing costs and risks of migration and thus counterbalancing budget constraints, mitigate this effect and allow new social strata to migrate. In the empirical analysis we examine Mexican migration to the U.S., proposing two new tools to apply in empirical analysis and showing that household and community networks act as complements in the probability of migration, and as substitutes in the optimal number of migrants. We also examine migration to the U.S. from five Central American countries, comparing findings with those obtained for Mexico.

This Doctoral thesis studies how nudges can help protect the environment. Three empirical and one theoretical studies investigate applications of green nudges and identify situations where they should, or should not, be used to promote environmental conservation. In Chapter 1, we explore the interplay between nudges and financial policy instruments using an incentivized online experiment that reproduces daily energy behaviors. We find that these two tools do not perform better when implemented together than individually. Our results suggest that in some situations, displacements between behavioral and financial policy tools are more likely to arise than synergies. Chapter 2 presents a field study in which a behavioral intervention is used to promote energy conservation in the workplace. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we find a significant reduction in branches’ monthly consumption outside the work schedule only, but not on overall consumption. Our findings suggest that nudges that are effective in the household context do not necessarily prompt behavioral change in the working environment. In Chapter 3, we develop a behavioral model for the usage of in-home displays that provide real-time feedback on energy consumption, focusing on social housing. On top of the cost-benefit analysis between financial and moral utility, on the one hand, and the effort from using them, on the other hand, we add the role of cognitive biases. This study seeks to improve the design of behavioral policies aimed at tackling energy poverty. Chapter 4 presents an incentivized online experiment that studies moral cleansing in the interpersonal and environmental domains. We find that bad behaviors that impact others trigger costly moral cleansing, whereas those that impact the environment do not even trigger costless cleansing. This empirically shows that people perceive environmental issues differently from other moral issues.

Global Value Chains (GVCs) emerged in the last decades and changed the landscape of the international organisation of production. Thanks to the reduction of transport costs and to the development of new technologies the production process increasingly fragmented into single phases carried out by different firms, also located in different countries. This led to the birth of a dense international network of production with multiple commercial and financial linkages between firms and countries. Such a complex architecture offers remarkable advantages, such as reduced procurement costs and high degrees of local/regional specialization, but also exposes to relevant risks and sources of instability, especially in the presence of unexpected shocks. For this reason, the international production network and GVCs emerged as an important topic in the international economic literature. In this globalization process, developed countries have so far had a central role: they have the highest shares of GVCs participation, extract the largest part of value added, and are positioned in the most profitable segments of the chains. However, GVCs may offer remarkable opportunities also for developing countries (Taglioni and Winkler 2016; World Bank 2019, 2020). This project focuses on the role that GVCs may have in the development process of North Africa. This area is trying to emerge from the group of middle income countries and enter a stable development path. However, the financial crisis of 2008 and the series of Arab Spring revolutions have undermined the progresses achieved over the past decades. In this scenario, the COVID-19 pandemic poses further serious concerns. Addressing economic development for the whole area is complex. Despite having suffered common shocks as well as sharing many demographic, cultural and social characteristics, the economic structure of these countries is different. Algeria and Libya are highly dependent on revenues from raw materials such as oil and natural gas; Morocco and Tunisia have developed over the years an advanced manufacturing fabric thanks also to the entry of foreign multinationals into domestic economy; finally, Egypt has an economic structure where traditional sectors, such as shipbuilding and agriculture, coexist along with advanced ones such as ICT. In light also of this diversity, my research is structured as a series of self-contained chapters focused on the analysis of specific issues concerning the role of GVCs on development. In particular, in the first chapter I address the impact of GVCs participation on firm productivity. The issue has been widely discussed in the literature: while first studies pointed out the existence of just a self-selection mechanism into international markets according to productivity, evidence came out about a learning by participating effect. The chapter enriches this literature by investigating Egyptian firms’ performances in the aftermath of the Arab Spring revolution. I find a positive and significant impact of GVCs participation on firm productivity, especially for domestic firms. In the second chapter, I investigate the relationship between firm GVCs participation and FDI activity using French administrative data. Relying on a very recent strand of literature, I hypothesise and prove that the direction of FDI follows and is caused by firm pattern of trade. Introducing governance indicators, I find changes in the general relationship according to countries' development. Moreover, a focus on NA reveals the peculiarity of this area. Finally, in the last chapter, I link the literature on GVCs with the Economic Complexity (EC) approach (Hidalgo et al., 2007; Hidalgo and Hausmann, 2009). The latter provides new tools and metrics to measure countries economic performances and offers interesting insights to study economic development. I link these strands of literature by applying the Product Space and other EC metrics to the study of GVCs. I also provide a new index to measure countries GVCs participation coherent with the EC approach. These contributions are then applied to the case study of NA countries. All in all, the research proves the importance of internationalisation for economic development. Integrating into GVCs, firms may increase their performances, and therefore countries improve their position and widen their linkages into the international production network.

The idea that public debt may represent a burden for the economic system as a whole has distant origins and focuses on who and how should pay for debt, and with what consequences on the economy. Nevertheless, particularly influential both for academic research and the implementation of the fiscal corrective policies was the empirical paper proposed by Reinhart and Rogoff in 2010 at the dawn of the crisis. Reinhart and Rogoff (2010), in a large panel of countries, identified a critical threshold of 90% of the debt-to-GDP ratio beyond which debt is harmful to growth. Several countries in the world were fast approaching that threshold or already were well beyond it. Though Reinhart and Rogoff’s work was affected by many flaws, it has spurred buoyant empirical research in search of the general debt thresholds above which growth is jeopardised by public debt. Further works have supported the existence of critical debt-to-GDP ratios under various time and space observational fields, but results of these researches are inconclusive or controversial, as discussed in Chapter 2. Country-specific characteristics and contingencies play in fact a prominent role, thus prompting a branch of literature that attempts to comprehensively understand the debt-growth relationship and its determinants (see for instance Panizza and Presbitero, 2014; Eberhardt and Presbitero, 2015). In contrast with the findings of the broad threshold literature and of many theoretical models, the idea that public debt is always harmful to economic growth has partially been reconsidered in the last few years. Nevertheless, the existence of a linkage between debt and growth has not been rejected: the long-run relationship between such macroeconomic variables is inevitably and broadly affected by heterogeneous factors. However, in retrospect and as emerges in Chapter 1, one may say that the empirical pursuit of the debt-to-GDP threshold harmful to growth lacks deeper foundational work: why should we expect a negative public debt-growth relationship? In addition, if such a relationship exists, why should it take the specific form of a threshold of the debt-to-GDP ratio, and why should we expect this threshold to be equally valid across time and space? These questions are the starting point of this Doctoral Thesis, which is organised as follows. Chapter 1 surveys the theoretical literature concerning public debt and economic growth, aiming at finding a theoretical foundation for the debt-threshold literature. Overall, there is no clear and straightforward answer to the questions of why we should expect a negative public debt-growth relationship in the first place, why it should take the specific form of a threshold of the debt-to-GDP ratio, and why we should expect this threshold to be equally valid across time and space. Or, from another perspective, there are many possible answers and many elements affecting them, thus reflecting the complexity of the argument, as well as the variety of the empirical situations. In particular, the literature that I examine, on the one hand offers a rich variety of explanations and insights to researchers of the debt-growth relationship but, on the other, it does not provide any one-way conclusion: the relationship may be negative, positive, or even no relationship may exist, both from a theoretical and an empirical point of view. Even less is theoretically founded the existence of a general debt-to-GDP threshold above which growth is consistently stifled. Each country’s specific characteristics, circumstances, and events have an overwhelming importance that cannot be encapsulated in a single general law. In Chapter 1, I also present a fiscal model of endogenous growth that may help address the theoretical issues in an orderly and consistent manner along two specific coordinates of debt assessment: sustainability/unsustainability, and efficiency/inefficiency. The thrust of the model is that no meaningful assessment of debt and its effect on growth at any point in time is possible without reference to the whole debt trajectory and the specific state of the economy along the trajectory. Chapter 2 reviews the empirical literature and focuses on the debt-growth relationship from an econometric point of view. As before, it is difficult to derive a univocal conclusion on the nature of such a relationship on the basis of the literature’s findings: the existence of a significant negative relationship between debt and growth is the predominant thinking, though in contrast with the conclusions of several works. For these reasons, the aim of Chapter 2 is to go to the roots of the debt-growth relationship, to investigate whether the outstanding debt and the GDP are linked. To this end, I have adopted a research methodology that differs from the most common employed in the literature on debt-to-GDP thresholds. First, my analysis does not hinge on any specific theory, and it should not be considered as a proof of a specific theoretical statement. Rather, it is based on the approach outlined by Hoover et al. (2008) and aims at understanding "what the data say" without imposing aprioristic theoretical structures. A second methodological choice consistent with this approach is to treat the (growth of the) amount of public debt and (the growth of) GDP as the two genuine primitives, without imposing the debt-to-GDP ratio as a primitive itself. In fact, for this to be possible, the two underlying primitives should display well defend statistical properties, namely cointegration and convergence towards a long-term equilibrium value, which are usually not tested in the literature. Third, I believe that the heterogeneity, or non-generality, of results that I have pointed out before should be taken as an intrinsic feature of the problem at hand, so that a viable strategy is to restrict, rather than expand, the observational field. I have set time and space limits to my dataset by purpose: my analysis is based on a panel dataset including quarterly data for 25 Eastern and Western European countries from 1999Q1 to 2015Q4. The Eurozone represents a unique "field experiment" of a large number of countries where some key conditioning factors of fiscal policy are common and exogenous, namely fiscal targets and rules, monetary policy, and the exchange rate with the rest of the world. The main result is that a long-run equilibrium relationship between GDP and debt exists for some countries ? and debt and GDP tend to adjust towards it ? but it is not generalisable. Where a relationship exists, it does not always imply that the debt-to-GDP ratio may be the appropriate variable for describing it. Moreover, cross-country heterogeneity and the role of the financial crisis and of the austerity periods remain substantial and overwhelming factors. Therefore, a unique equation describing the GDP-debt relationship does not seem to exist, which entails the impossibility to derive a meaningful general debt-to-GDP threshold. Thus far I have focused on the general relationship between debt and growth from both the theoretical and the empirical points of view. Turning to the analysis of the Sovereign Debt Crisis and of the austerity period, Chapter 3 attempts to explain what has driven austerity ? measured as the first difference of the cyclically adjusted structural primary balance ? within a dataset of 28 European countries. In the first part of this chapter I present a correlation analysis that describes the relationship between the variable austerity and each of the considered determinants, that are brought back to four main sets of variables: fiscal discipline, market discipline, fiscal consolidation, and macroeconomic stabilisation. The second part implements a panel econometric analysis based on the principal component factor analysis and on the pooled partial common correlation effect estimator. Results show that the variables and factors of the analysis are not able to fully explain austerity, though an important contribution is provided by the enforcement of the Eurozone fiscal rules (the adoption of excessive deficit procedures) and is partially counterbalanced by the cyclical position of the economy. The last chapter, Chapter 4, aims at gaining insight into the role of debt and government expectations and their impact on growth under uncertainty conditions. In fact, it is possible that the effects of austerity measures in some countries, for instance the so-called PIIGS, were amplified by uncertainty. My ambition is to relate austerity with consumers’ expectations, thus studying whether and when consumers’ beliefs about public debt and government intervention affect their consumption, savings, and tax compliance choices with a direct impact, at the aggregate level, on economic growth. Therefore, Chapter 4 implements a laboratory experiment to study how people react in a generalized framework in which public debt may be unexpectedly reduced. The debt dynamics arises endogenously: within a public good game, taxes are collected from all participants and are used to cover a given level of public expenditure, which is then equally distributed to the same participants at the beginning of each round. If the collected amount of taxes is lower than what the public expenditure would require, a deficit is generated. Moreover, reproducing a forced withdrawal, the outstanding amount of public debt can be reduced upon accessing subjects’ savings. Within this setting, expectations are directly elicited by asking subjects if they believe that public debt is going to be reduced, and if they think that the other subjects believe that public debt is sustainable. Therefore, it is possible to identify whether and how agents’ allocations and expectations are affected by the public debt path. As mentioned above, a peculiarity of my approach is the endogenous dynamics of public debt: not only it avoids introducing predetermined dynamics, but also increases the ecological validity of the experiment. Participants are indeed more psychologically involved in the debt mechanism and they might feel responsible for the raise in debt. On the other hand, an exogenous dynamics could depict public debt and tax compliance as irrelevant. Results show that this experimental framework is characterized by relatively high and often increasing aggregate savings and relatively low and decreasing aggregate consumption. Interestingly, an increase in the debt-reduction expectations and a decrease in the perceived debt sustainability are also found to explain savings and consumption behaviours, as is shown in the econometric part of Chapter 4.

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.

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).

Agricultural cooperatives emerge as tools through which individual farmers meet their economic and social needs and they do so in a manner that allows them both to economize on costs and to disperse the risks associated with pursuing these needs individually. They are particularly useful for enhancing economic development of transition countries in which basic market economy infrastructure is either underdeveloped or is altogether missing. However, agricultural cooperatives do not always deliver the desired level of rural development. Although the literature sometimes takes this to mean that the model itself is defective, I argue to the contrary. In this thesis, I propose that it is the evolutionary path of cooperative idea, its implementation in reality and the way in which it interacts with its institutional surroundings that condition the ability of the model to perform. In other words, cooperative idea is not immune to its political and economic context but rather it is molded by it, and sometimes to the point that it no longer resembles its original substance. In line with that, the main objective of this thesis is to look into factors that either stimulate or discourage development and functioning of agricultural cooperatives in a context of post-socialist and post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). In doing so, the thesis adopts a new institutionalist frame of analysis combining it with the insights from the economics of the third sector and the cooperative theory to highlight both the evolutionary nature of cooperative idea as well as its embeddedness in the socio-economic context. The research relied on quantitative and qualitative approaches and gathered data from field work and secondary sources. The main findings can be summarized in the following several points: both formal and informal institutions have shaped the way in which cooperatives are understood and utilized by farmers in BiH; cooperatives in post-socialist and post-conflict settings require legal clarity that not only sets them apart from other types of firms in the market but also from degenerated forms of cooperatives that exist to serve interests of few individuals rather than cooperative members and their communities; when judged by the standards that apply to cooperatives in economically advanced societies, it is safe to state that there are very few true cooperatives in BiH; given the structure of agricultural market and number of farmers, there is a lot of potential in utilizing the cooperative model for purposes of rural development. However, using cooperatives for development purposes requires a basic alignment between the features of institutional environment and cooperative organizational characteristics. If stimulated properly through positive policy changes, cooperatives can exhibit transformative potential that is best reflected in how they empower their patrons as well as contribute to the development of their communities.

The rapid proliferation of North-South preferential trade agreements (PTAs) during the last quarter century has had broad implications for developing and emerging economies. As a result of North-South power asymmetries and the aggressive trade policy that has been characterized as ‘competitive liberalization,’ it has been argued that these agreements have produced asymmetric results in favor of Northern countries. This thesis advances a novel approach in the assessment of North-South preferential trade relations that goes beyond the simplistic interpretation of North-South trade politics as a phenomenon largely dominated by North-South power asymmetries. By acknowledging that not all North-South PTAs have the same characteristics, this thesis divides North-South PTAs into two sequential categories: first-order, i.e., Southern countries’ first North-South PTAs and second-order, i.e., Southern countries’ subsequent North-South PTAs. The thesis argues that, while first-order North-South PTA negotiations can produce asymmetric outcomes in favor of Northern countries because they have the ability to exert discriminative pressure on Southern countries, second-order North-South PTA negotiations follow a different logic. Having secured preferential access to Northern markets through first-order PTAs, Southern countries become immune to competitive pressures and can themselves exert discriminative pressure on Northern countries during second-order negotiations. The thesis examines the North-South PTA negotiations of Mexico, Chile, Korea, Colombia, and Peru, five countries of the Global South that have been especially active in North-South preferential trade. Based on the author’s personal interviews with EU and US trade officials and primary and secondary sources, this thesis conducts process tracing to account for the process of the five Southern countries’ first-order and second-order North-South PTA negotiations and reveal the impact of first-order North-South PTAs on the bargaining powers of Southern countries in second-order negotiations and hence the outcomes of second-order agreements. The thesis concludes that, albeit to varying extents, first-order agreements improve the bargaining powers of Southern countries in second-order North-South trade negotiations.