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We live in a world where resources are limited and how we invest them has an impact on the citizens’ wellbeing. The goal of this thesis is to provide, through the tools of economic analysis, some insights for the optimal allocation of our resources in three different areas: economics of crime, economics of education and economics of labour. First, societies aim at lowering crime rates and this is why a great amount of resources is spent in punishing offenders. How effective is punishment in lowering crime rates is still unclear: what are the forms of custody that deter lawbreakers from resuming their life of crime? Through a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, we show that keeping young offenders separate from their older peers and far from an overcrowded environment is beneficial only when rehabilitation is offered. Second, empowering women and enhancing children’s early childhood development are two important objectives that are often pursued by independent policy initiatives in developing countries. Understanding the consequences of exploiting potentially beneficial complementarities in pursuing both aims together can be relevant. Through a quasi-natural experiment we evaluate a program implemented in Quito, Ecuador, that targets both. We find that women who are involved in the education of their children are empowered in different dimensions, as reflected in their higher likelihood to find full-time employment in the formalsector and in their greater independence in intra-household decision-making. Children’s dropout rates decrease, while school grades and scores on cognitive tests increase, particularly for girls. Finally, governments can introduce and raise minimum wage levels in order to protect their workers. We want to understand the implications of minimum wages on informal markets in developing countries. By exploiting relative variation in minimum wages across labour market groups within countries we show that a higher minimum wage is associated with a larger selfemployment share.

This thesis contains three essays in evolutionary game theory. In the first chapter, we study the impact of switching costs on the long run outcome in 2X2 coordination games played in the circular city model of local interactions. We find that for low levels of switching costs, the risk dominant convention is the unique long run equilibrium. For intermediate levels of switching costs the set of long run equilibria contains the risk dominant convention but may also contain conventions that are not risk dominant. For high levels of switching costs also nonmonomorphic states will be included in the set of LRE. We study the impact of location heterogeneity on neighborhood segregation in the one-dimensional Schelling residential model in the second chapter. We model location heterogeneity by introducing an advantageous node, in which a player’s utility is impartial to the composition of her neighborhood. We find that when every player interacts with two neighbors, one advantageous node in the circular city will lead to a result that segregation is no longer the unique LRE. When players interact with more neighbors, more advantageous nodes are necessary to obtain the same result. In the third chapter, we consider a model of social coordination and network formation, where players of two groups play a 2X2 coordination game when connected. Players in one group actively decide on whom they play with and on the action in the game, while players in the other group decide on the action in the game only. We find that if either group’s population size is small in comparison to the linking restriction, all players will choose the risk dominant equilibrium, while when both groups are sufficiently large in population, the players of two groups will coordinate on the payoff dominant action.

In this thesis, I study the strategic foundations of oligopolies in general equilibrium by following the approach based on strategic market games. The thesis is organised as follows. In Chapter 1, I first survey some of the main contributions on imperfect competition in production economies and the main problems which arise in this framework. I then focus on the literature on imperfect competition in exchange economies by considering the Cournot-Walras approach and strategic market games. I finally discuss the main contributions on the foundations of oligopolies. In Chapter 2, I extend the non-cooperative analysis of oligopoly to exchange economies with infinitely many commodities and traders by using a strategic market game with trading posts. I prove the existence of a Cournot-Nash equilibrium with trade and show that the price vector and the allocation at the Cournot-Nash equilibrium converge to the Walras equilibrium when the number of traders increases. In a framework with infinitely many commodities, an oligopolist can be an "asymptotic oligopolist" if his market power is uniformly bounded away from zero on an infinite set of commodities, or an "asymptotic price-taker" if his market power converges to zero along the sequence of commodities. The former corresponds to the Cournotian idea of oligopolist. The latter describes an agent with a kind of mixed behaviour since his market power can be made arbitrary small by choosing an appropriate infinite set of commodities while it is greater than a positive constant on a finite set. In Chapter 3, I further study oligopolies in economies with infinitely many commodities and traders. By using the strategic market game called "all for sale model", I prove the existence of an asymptotic price-taker. Heuristically, an asymptotic price-taker exists if at least one trader makes positive bids on an infinite number of commodities and in all markets the quantities of commodities exchanged are non-negligible. In Chapter 4, I study if there is a non-empty intersection between the sets of Cournot-Nash and Walras allocations in mixed exchange economies, with oligopolists represented as atoms and small traders represented by a continuum. In a bilateral oligopoly setting, I show that a necessary and sufficient condition for a Cournot-Nash allocation to be a Walras allocation is that all atoms demand a null amount of one of the two commodities. I also provide four examples which show that this characterization holds non-vacuously.

This dissertation studies the intersection between the sharing of individual specific risks and business cycle risks. Individual specific or idiosyncratic risk sharing is typically hampered by moral hazard, and in Chapter 2 we propose a new theory of debt finance as an effective mechanism for sharing idiosyncratic risks. But business cycle or systemic risk sharing is also affected by the means of idiosyncratic risk sharing. Departures from full systemic risk sharing can dampen the incentive compatibility constraint allowing a greater degree of idiosyncratic risk sharing (Chapter 1). Entrepreneurs’ productive risk can quickly transform into low employment, as wages fall below marginal revenue products of labour (Chapter 3). Market prices for systemic risk insurance do not necessarily internalise balance sheet externalities, resulting in excessive swings in leverage and factor market wedges of inefficiency (Chap- ter 4). Sometimes, agents have private information about the risks faced by their projects, and how they correlate with the broader economy. When this is the case, optimal systemic risk sharing arrangements must allocate business systemic risk in a way that deters entrepreneurs from herding among their peers (Chapter 5).

The behavior of economic agents is characterized by interdependencies that arise from common shocks, strategic interactions or spill-over effects. Developing new econometric methodologies for inference in panel data with cross-sectional dependence is a common theme of this thesis. Another theme is econometric models that allow for heterogeneity across individual observations. Each chapter takes a different approach towards modeling and estimating panels with cross-sectional dependence and heterogeneity. In all chapters, the perspective is one where both the time series and the cross-sectional dimension are large. The first chapter develops a methodology for semiparametric panel data models with heterogeneous nonparametric covariate effects as well as unobserved time and individual-specific effects that may depend on the covariates in an arbitrary way. To model the covariate effects parsimoniously, we impose a dimensionality reducing common component structure on them. In the theoretical part of the chapter, we derive the asymptotic theory of the proposed procedure. In particular, we provide the convergence rates and the asymptotic distribution of our estimators. The asymptotic analysis is complemented by a Monte Carlo experiment that documents the small sample properties of our estimator. The second chapter investigates the effects of fragmentation in equity markets on the quality of trading outcomes. It uses a unique data set that reports the location and volume of trading on the FTSE 100 and 250 companies from 2008 to 2011 at the weekly frequency. This period coincided with a great deal of turbulence in the UK equity markets which had multiple causes that need to be controlled for. To achieve this, we use the common correlated effects estimator for large heterogeneous panels that approximates the unobserved factors with cross-sectional averages. We extend this estimator to quantile regression to analyze the whole conditional distribution of market quality. We find that both fragmentation in visible order books and dark trading that is offered outside the visible order book lower volatility. But dark trading increases the variability of volatility and trading volumes. Visible fragmentation has the opposite effect on the variability of volatility, in particular at the upper quantiles of the conditional distribution. The third chapter develops an estimator for heterogeneous panels with discrete outcomes in a setting where the individual units are subject to unobserved common shocks. Like the estimator in chapter 2, the proposed estimator belongs to the class of common correlated effects estimators and it assumes that the unobserved factors are contained in the span of the observed factors and the cross-sectional averages of the regressors. The proposed estimator can be computed by estimating binary response models applied to regression that is augmented with the crosssectional averages of the individual-specific regressors. The asymptotic properties of this approach are documented as both the time series and the cross-section tend to infinity. In particular, I show that both the estimators of the individual-specific coefficients and the mean group estimator are consistent and asymptotically normal. The small-sample behavior of the mean group estimator is assessed in a Monte Carlo experiment. The methodology is applied to the question of how funding costs in corporate bond markets affect the conditional probability of issuing a corporate bond.

This monograph examines the – at times, seemingly irrational – decision-making behaviour of entrepreneurs in the East African agricultural market. It seeks to reconcile empirical observations made between 2011 and 2014 in the towns of Oyam and Kapchorwa, two communities with centuries of entirely separate agricultural history, with a larger decision-making framework. Drawing on decision sciences, development economics, and other literatures, various theoretical frameworks are explored to explain the domain-specific decision-making observed in Uganda. First, two largely rational, cost-focused decision-making scenarios are described, with the context and domain-specific boundaries of each described. Next, a third, economically sub-optimal decision-making scenario is described, with the factors distinguishing it from the first two explained. In other words, the agricultural entrepreneurs behave as econs1 (exhibiting the anticipated behaviour) in the first two instances, but exhibit System 1 thinking2 (demonstrating unexpected behaviour) in the final instance. A comprehensive discussion reconciles the seemingly-conflicting empirical observations by segregating them by context and arguing the two decision-making systems employed, while contradictory, can and do co-exist as domain-specific approaches.

This thesis contains three chapters that fall under the broad banner of development economics, with a particular focus on the study of mechanisms and strategies that improve public goods delivery. The first chapter studies the role of financial incentives as signals of job attributes when these are unknown to potential applicants. I create experimental variation in expected earnings and use it to estimate the effect of financial incentives on candidates’ perception of a newly created health worker position in Uganda and, through this, on the size and composition of the applicant pool. I find that more lucrative positions are perceived as entailing a lower positive externality for the community, and discourage agents with strong prosocial preferences from applying. While higher financial incentives attract more applicants and increase the probability of filling a vacancy, they hamper retention and performance. This is because the signal they convey reduces the ability to recruit the most socially motivated agents, who are found to stay longer on the job and to perform better. The second chapter analyzes the role of social connections on the targeting choices of delivery agents. During the expansion of an agriculture extension program in Uganda, we randomly selected one delivery agent out of two eligible candidates per community. We find that social connections matter: relative to farmers connected only to the non-selected candidate, those connected only to the selected delivery agent benefit more from the program. They are indeed more likely to receive advice, training and more likely to adopt improved seeds, a new beneficial technology. We show that these results are consistent with delivery agents (a) putting positive weight on the utility of farmers connected to them (altruism) and (b) putting a negative weight on the utility of farmers connected to the rival candidate (spite). This sheds light on the importance of both positive and negative social preferences in shaping program delivery. The third chapter studies the effect of movement restrictions on education. The evidence is based on the construction of the West Bank Separation Barrier in 2003. The exposure of an individual to the Barrier is determined both by her locality of residence and by whether she was in school or about to start school when the Barrier was built. Using a difference-indifferences approach, I find that movement restrictions increase the probability of dropping out from elementary and preparatory school by 3.7 and 6 percentage points respectively, i.e. a 50% increase relative to localities with no movement restrictions, while the proportion of children who have never attended school increased by 3.6 percentage points. Among all households, the poorest ones are the most affected, indicating that movement restrictions not only deteriorate the average education level but also increase income inequality.

I present a thesis in three chapters on the topics of Macroeconomics and Finance. In the first chapter, I study the ex ante effects of the fear of future financial crises. Crises are modelled through multiple equilibria driven by a self-fulfilling fall in asset prices. I study the effects of allowing agents to anticipate such an event. In a financial crisis, capital is pushed away from experts and towards less productive households, worsening the allocation of capital. Anticipation of this lowers asset prices, investment, and growth today, even if experts are currently well enough capitalised to survive a crisis. The possibility of future crises also creates a state-dependent“financial crisis accelerator” which can amplify business-cycle shocks. In the model, prudential policy can simultaneously increase growth and stabilise the economy, in contrast with common arguments that prudential policy should decrease growth. In the second chapter, I present evidence that countries which experienced greater declines in total factor productivity (TFP) during the Great Recession experienced milder contractions in hours worked. Thus I show that there is a tension between the crisis manifesting itself either as a problem with productivity or with labour markets. Additionally, countries with larger falls in real wages tend to be those with TFP, and not labour market, problems. Inspired by these facts, I build a model of sticky wages, and prove that wage adjustment determines the extent to which a financial crisis leads to declines in TFP or hours worked. Larger falls in real wages protect labour markets from reductions in hours. However, lower real wages reduce the incentive to reallocate resources across firms during the crisis, leading to larger declines in productivity. In the final chapter, I introduce financial frictions into the labour market matching model, and study interactions between the two frictions. I demonstrate a feedback between asset and labour markets which amplifies the model’s response to exogenous shocks. Shocks which increase equity holders’ net worth allow them to fund more vacancies, raising market tightness and lowering the ease with which firms can hire workers. This increases the value of being an existing firm, causing stock prices to appreciate. This increases experts’ net worth further, amplifying the initial shock in a mechanism akin to the traditional financial accelerator. I derive an arbitrage equation in my model similar to the standard free entry condition. I show that any matching model which possesses this arbitrage equation, including the standard matching model, is able to match 82% of the volatility in US market tightness if calibrated to match the volatility in asset prices.

The aim of this study is to assess the performance of the Algerian public industrial sector and identify the reasons for its inefficiency. The study is based on an empirical analysis of six public industrial enterprises: SONIC (pulp and paper), SNMC (construction materials), SNIC (light chemical), SONATRACH (hydrocarbons), SNS (iron and steel) and SONACOME (mechanical engineering). In this representative study of public industrial enterprises, 171 plants and complexes were investigated. In order to measure the efficiency of these public enterprises, input utilisation (raw materials, intermediate inputs, fixed capital and labour) is analysed. Given that Algeria is a capital-scarce econcny, emphasis is placed on fixed capital utilisation via the calculations of U1 (ratio of actual over planned output), U2 (ratio of planned over technical output) and U3 (ratio of actual over technical number of shifts or time utilisation of fixed capital). It was found that the average rate of fixed capital utilisation for the public enterprises studied was 72.81%, 76.64% and 71.27% as measured by U1, U2 and U3, respectively. With this information and according to evidence provided by the plant managers, it was concluded that the different inputs were inefficiently used in all the public enterprises studied and, by and large in the entire Algerian public industrial sector. Four causes of inefficient utilisation of inputs were identified: organisational factors, shortages of inputs, allocative inefficiencies and demand shortages. The potential for significant increases in industrial output and employment, therefore, exists. A cross country comparison among Turkey, Egypt and Algeria showed that several causes of inefficiency encountered in Algeria were also observed in the other, more experienced countries characterised by similar economic systems. From this study, some policy recommendations directly related to the problems encountered, emerged.