Economic research frequently uses experimental methods to study, in the laboratory or in the field, behaviour of economic agents. The advantage of the laboratory experimental method is the collection of data which is, in some cases, otherwise impossible to obtain. In addition, experiments permit to test, ceteris paribus, the impact of a certain treatment on the behaviour of the economic agents. These are the reasons for the application of laboratory experimental methods in the three essays of this thesis; which are focused on possible measures for rising compliant behaviour in social and agency dilemmas. Tax compliance has been selected for two essays on social dilemma, while asset management has been chosen for one essay on agency dilemma. In the tax compliance context, we refer to a compliant behaviour when subjects do not engage tax evasion: the support of compliance has been studied through non monetary (dis)incentives (Chapter 2) and through direct participation of taxpayers in the tax system (Chapter 3). In the asset management context (Chapter 4), we refer to a compliant behaviour when a fund manager, managing her clients's money, follows the client's disposition even if this implies a payoff reduction for the manager herself. Accountability and monetary punishment are the measures studied in order to reduce opportunistic behaviour of managers and rise their compliance.

Each of us is made up of the decisions that we make. The rich tapestry of our lives is constructed from the hundreds of thousands of decisions that have led us to this very moment. If each of us were endowed with perfect rationality, our optimal decision-making qualities might lead us down similar paths. But here we are, instead each of us on unique and sometime bumpy rides accentuated by our perfectly irrational choices. The goal of my research is to make sense of our faulty decision making in areas related to personal health by applying insights from the field of behavioral economics. I am not the only one searching for answers. It's an exciting time to be a behavioral economist in light of the relatively recent birth of the subfield, as a splinter off of the traditional economics cutting block. It is a moment of prolific research in a thriving field of economists seeking to understand how exactly we err in the decision-making process, and what precisely can be done to help us err less. The timing could not be better for addressing poor decision-making in the health field. Behavioral factors play a starring role in today's burgeoning health crises, considering that smoking and tobacco use, lack of physical activity, poor eating habits, excessive alcohol use, and medical treatment noncompliance contribute to many of today's most prevalent health problems. In this doctoral thesis, I consider first and foremost the foundations of behavioral economics and its arrival from notions of bounded rationality and Prospect Theory, and what tools it offers to address pressing health issues. In the first chapter, I also consider the innovations in applications of behavioral economics to the most persistent health issues. In the following chapters, I offer new research (performed in collaboration with my coauthors) that applies concepts of behavioral economics to enhance decision making in two contexts. The role of information provision and quality is considered in light of parental decision making in the setting of childhood vaccines. Then I present the results of HealthyMe, an intensive collaborative effort involving experimental testing of an intervention to encourage active travel by foot and on bicycle using participants' cellphone to both record active travel and deliver nudge and feedback messages through a specially developed cellphone app.

The present thesis is a collection of contributions concerning the application of the clearing principle in real and financial markets. In particular, two issues are deepened. The first concerns the effect of bilateral clearing of interbank deposits in the reduction of systemic risk. The second focuses on the endogenous formation process of clearing houses that manage payments. The methodology applied in the three contributions is the network analysis combined with agent-based models and computer simulations. The work is structured in four sections. The first defines and describes the more popular clearing agreements from a legal and economic point of view and provides a presentation of the three collected papers. The second section investigates the effect of bilateral netting on financial stability during a liquidity crisis. The third section analyzes how bilateral netting affects the resilience of an interbank credit network in the event of a shock affecting the assets of an intermediary. The fourth section analyzes the endogenous formation of clearing houses in both corporate barter circuits and interbank payment networks.

Repeated games of cooperation share the same equilibrium selection problem as coordination games. In both settings, providing information might help players coordinating on efficient equilibria. Which equilibrium is most likely to be selected strictly depends on the type and the amount of information provided. It is then natural to ask under which conditions providing more information increases efficiency. The present thesis makes a step in answering this question. It analyzes how the presence of information regarding either the opponent, or the options that are available for choice, might change players' behavior. It focuses on two settings where increasing information might be detrimental for players: a repeated Prisoner's dilemma, and a coordination game. The first chapter develops a theoretical model in which players have limited information about the opponents' previous moves. When applied to the Trust Game, we show that by increasing the amount of information disclosed to the first player, more exploitative equilibria appear, in which that player obtains a smaller payoff. These equilibria disappear in settings in which the information the first player obtains about the second player's past behavior is limited. This is a case in which providing a player more information may reduce his payoff in equilibrium. In the second chapter, we test this latter result with a laboratory experiment, and we show that subjects do understand that different behavior might be optimal in different settings. Subjects tend to use a fully cooperative strategy more often when only minimal information is available. Moreover, subjects trying to exploit the opponent succeeded in gaining more than the mutual cooperation payoff only when the information provided to the opponent is sufficiently rich, that is when our model predicts that exploitative outcomes are equilibria. The last chapter considers the effects of introducing information about the options available for choice in a coordination game. It reports the results from a simulated crowdfunding experiment. We show that the presence of non payoff-relevant information is able to make a project focal. However, when returns from coordination are uncertain, the presence of information is instead detrimental for coordination.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate experimentally the reliability of the predictions of evolutionary game theory concerning equilibrium selection. Particularly, I analyze how an adjustment of the initial conditions, which were stated to be one of the essential factors in determining long-run stochastic equilibrium, may change the outcome of the game. The current work studies equilibrium selection in the framework of technology adoption in the presence of an established convention. It consists of three chapters. The first provides an extensive survey of theoretical and experimental literature on equilibrium selection, technology adoption and the emergence of conventions. The second chapter presents an experiment that investigates whether a new technology, represented by an introduction of either a risk-dominant or a payoff dominant strategy, is capable to break a conventional equilibrium and provoke the adoption of another one. In the third chapter I present an experiment that studies whether adding a dominated strategy to a coordination game facilitates transition from one equilibrium to another by changing their basins of attraction.

The structure of this dissertation is as follows. The first chapter presents a literature review on FDI with the aim to explore the motivations driving a firm to expand investments abroad, the reasons why FDI is preferred to other investment forms, and the main factors affecting location choices of foreign investors. Since our thesis focuses on location decisions of foreign firms in Vietnam, we spend more room on the discussion of the location theories such as the theory of comparative advantages, localization theory, institutional based view and information cost approach. Subsequently, we present a theoretical review on FDI determinants in transition economies and in Vietnam. We state that market size, labor costs and the riskiness of investment environments are key factors affecting FDI inflows to these countries. The final section provides the description of data source that is used for the empirical studies in Vietnam. The second chapter studies the effect of institutional practices by local authorities on the entry rates of foreign firms in Vietnam over the period 2000-2005. The Vietnamese provincial competitiveness index in 2006 (PCI 2006) and its two sub-indices reflecting attitudes of local government toward state-owned enterprises and the capability of private enterprises to access to necessary information for their business are used as proxies for institutional implementations by provincial authorities. The empirical findings show that provinces with better institutional performance attract more foreign firms. The results support our argument that just as institutions at the national level affecting the overall volume of FDI inflows, informal institutions at the sub-national level influence FDI spatial distributions among provinces within the country. Formal legal changes initiated at the centre have varied impacts across provinces because the implementation of laws and regulations at local level depends on the informal institutions determined by attitudes (norms and cognitions) of local authorities. The third chapter examines the effects of agglomeration economies on the location choices by foreign firms in Vietnam. By using a large dataset that provides detailed information about individual firms, we examine the location choices by 568 newly created foreign firms in 2005 in about 150 different 4-digit industries. The estimates of the negative binomial regression model and the conditional logit model strongly support our hypotheses that agglomeration benefits motivate foreign firms in the same industries and from the same countries of origin to locate near each other. Moreover, the empirical results show that provinces in Vietnam compete with each other to attract FDI, and the locations of Vietnamese firms have no effects on the location decisions by foreign firms in the same industry. The last chapter investigates the survival probability of foreign entrants in Vietnam by looking at the life span of 187 foreign firms created in 2000 over the period 2000-2005. By applying the Cox proportional hazard model, we find that foreign firms with larger start-up size and growing current size are more likely to stay longer in the market. We also reveal that foreign firms entering the market with wholly-owned subsidiaries rather than making joint ventures with local partners can live longer. In addition, locating in industrial zones or export processing zones increases the survival probability of foreign firms due to tax priority and other incentives. However, by contrast to our prediction, agglomeration economies have no significant effect on firm survival. As expected, cultural distance is found to have a strong impact on the survival of foreign firms. Proximities in culture make it easier for foreign firms in cooperating with local partners, therefore increasing their success in foreign markets.

The present Thesis, in the form of a collection of three essays, provides a contribution to the literature on the effects of the public support to innovation activities. The first paper aims at providing a review and a critical discussion of the literature dealing with the additionality of innovation policy, that is, the net effects of the public support that would not have occurred in the absence of the policy. In particular, the paper focuses on the behavioural dimension of the additionality concept, i.e. the strategic and behavioural changes induced by the policy. In the first part, the paper argues that the behavioural dimension, though not yet clearly defined, provides a necessary complement to the input and output dimensions, when assessing innovation policies consistently with the evolutionary theory and the related innovation system perspective. In the second part, the paper organises and reviews the recent empirical works that have tried to measure, with econometric and quantitative methods, the strategic and behavioural changes induced by the policy interventions. In so doing, it presents some main methodological issues that characterise the investigation of the behavioural additionality, as well as the main behavioural changes that public support to innovation activities can induce. Starting from the framework provided in the first paper, the Thesis proposes two empirical applications. The first of these is presented in the second paper. This aims at proposing and applying a new multi-level and multi-dimensional evaluation of the additionality effects of innovation policy. The impacts of national and regional support schemes are jointly investigated (multi-level), by simultaneously analysing their input, output and behavioural additionality effects (multi-dimension). By making use of micro-data on manufacturing firms stemming from the 4th wave of the Community Innovation Survey, an empirical application of this kind of assessment is provided for two EU countries, namely Italy and Spain. To control for the selection bias, the econometric strategy is based upon a set of propensity score matching estimations of the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT). The picture of the results is quite complex. In both countries, only national policies increase R&D investment. On the other hand, their regional and national interventions induce additional innovation performances and innovation behaviours of different nature. The proposed methodology is integrated with an original, although somehow tentative, analysis of the relation between the average additionality effects of the policies and the dispersion of their impacts. With the exception of Italian regional policies, the higher is the average additionality level, the lower is found to be the polarisation of the policy effect. The third paper included in the Thesis, has a more narrow focus. It aims at identifying the extent to which regional innovation policy affects firms’ innovation behaviour. Some research hypotheses are put forward. At first, the policy support is supposed to induce relevant changes in the beneficiaries' behaviour, which can help to solve potential regional system failures. Moreover, an increasing amount of regional subsidy is expected to enhance the geographical range of the cooperation with universities and research institutes, allowing firms to interact with “global best” and more suitable research partners. These hypotheses are tested with respect to a sample of manufacturing firms located in the NUTS-2 Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, by making use of a unique dataset including information on pre-policy characteristics and post-policy behaviours. The econometric strategy is based, at first, on a set of propensity score matching estimations. The recently developed generalised propensity score method, which is suitable for a continuous treatment framework, is also employed. At first, the policy is found to enhance the competencies’ upgrading of the beneficiaries, as well as their interactions with both regional and extra-regional research organisations. Furthermore, the amount of subsidy is found to be important to extend beyond the regional borders the cooperation with research partners: over a minimum efficient scale of public funding, an increase in the subsidy enhances the propensity to cooperate with extra-regional universities and research institutes.

The dissertation is articulated in three empirical applications which focus on the economic development of Ethiopian smallholders either on and off-farm from 2012 to 2016. The complete title of the thesis is “Non-farm Entrepreneurial Activities and the Role of Non-cognitive Skills in Agriculture. Theoretical Framework and Empirical Evidence from Ethiopia”. In fact, one of the earliest and most central insights of the literature on economic development is that development entails structural change. The countries that manage to pull out of poverty and get richer are those that are able to diversify away from agriculture and other traditional products. As labor and other resources move from agriculture into modern economic activities, overall productivity rises and incomes expand. However, the enhancing technologies developed by modern economic sectors may be reinvested on farm increasing the agricultural productivity too. The production on the farm side is analyzed in the first two papers of the thesis, while the third one focuses on the non-farm sector. The first two papers share the same data set which is a cross-section survey collected in two rural regions in Ethiopia during the crop year 2012. It was financed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), with the collaboration of the CEIS of the University of Torvergata and implemented by the University of Addis Ababa. The survey collected also non-cognitive skills of the 501 households in the survey using two well-known psychometric tests: the Big Five Inventory test and the Emotion Regulation questionnaire. These traits were used for the empirical estimation of the agricultural production function and the agricultural input equations in order to see how these traits affect productive and allocative efficiency in rural Ethiopia. Results show a statistical relevance of personality traits in affecting both production and input choice/application. Furthermore, when non-cognitive skills variables are explicated in the models is possible to confirm the “recursive structure” between output and inputs usage proposed by Zellner et al (1966). Namely, the use of the OLS technique for the production function estimation is (weakly) validated thanks to the explication personality traits variables in the model generally omitted in the neoclassical model specifications. The third paper analyses whether the economic activities off-farm in Ethiopia are the results of push or pull factors. We wanted to assess if households were attracted in these activities because of the remunerative opportunities or if they were pushed due to ex ante coping mechanisms. For the empirical application, we rely on longitudinal panel data “Living Standard Measurement Study- Integrated Survey on Agriculture” collected by World Bank (WB). We use the three rounds available (2011/2012, 2013/2014, and 2015/2016) to track households overtime. Furthermore, the empirical strategy relies on different kind of econometric techniques: cluster analysis, multivariate regressions and Heckman correction models. Then, we focused on the impact of household’s non-farm engagement on households’ wellbeing (consumption and agricultural input expenditure). Results show that push factors are the main drivers of households’ participation in the non-farm sector, and without further investments in infrastructure and education these activities are not likely to be the engine for further economic development in Ethiopia.

Economic experiments allow the investigator to achieve a controlled variation of some particular variable of interest, holding constant other background conditions. However, as it relates to communication, such a controlled variation may not be straightforward to achieve. We critically evaluate the design and implementation of game experiments in economics, and provide a review of the literature focusing mainly on bargaining and trust games (Chapter 1). Following some established results of anticipated communication in the dictator game, we investigate whether strategic considerations crowd out anticipatory effects of communication in the ultimatum game (Chapter 2). Finally, we identify and implement an experimental design that examines the role of first-mover anticipated communication on the inter-player strategic power dynamics that exist in a symmetric simultaneous move prisoners' dilemma and a sequential move investment game (Chapter 3).

In the field of decision-making under risk, researchers have started to focus on the effect of information acquisition modality on people’s decisional pro- cess, by means of a comparison between Decision from Description (DfD) and Decision from Experience (DfE). A literature review on the topic is provided in Chapter 1, which analyzes the determinants of the so-called description- experience gap and its translation into the planning-ongoing gap, according to which people tend to overweight rare events under description (or planning) and underweight them under experience (or ongoing decision-making). In such a framework, Chapter 2 experimentally investigates delegation in risky choices, in a three-party agency framework. Agents build a portfolio for their principals by selecting among prospects that are either fully described or experienced. Nevertheless, principals are given the opportunity to take over control and build their own portfolio by paying a fee. Principals are more efficient and ambitious than agents. Such a higher quality of principals’ portfolios is associated to a higher effort exerted in collecting information on risky options. Principals anticipate this performance difference, but pay a control fee that is generally excessive and negatively impacts on their final earnings. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 study tax compliance, by providing a comparison between the two information acquisition modalities. Specifically, Chapter 3 serves as an introduction to Chapter 4, as it reviews the main theoretical and experimental literature on tax compliance, by referring to the role of objec- tive, perceived, and weighted probabilities in compliance decisions. Besides this, it provides a novel methodological analysis that justifies the adoption of laboratory experiments as an externally valid tool if sustained by agent-based simulations in the field of tax compliance. Chapter 4 reports on a laboratory experiment designed to explore the presence of the planning-ongoing gap in taxpayers’ behavior, by means of a (self) commitment system for compliance. In line with overweighting of rare events - i.e., fiscal audits-, planning induces the majority of people not only to opt for a commitment to tax compliance, but also to actually comply.