Since the end of the Cold War, post-conflict countries have attracted widespread economic assistance and policy advice from donor community to support their recoveries from war, to rebuild institutional capacities, and to restore their human and social capital. Yet, donor responses to post-conflict countries are uneven and some countries have received substantial amounts of assistance in the immediate aftermath of the conflict (e.g., Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq). In addition, the stark environment of the post-conflict countries poses challenges to both recipient and donor countries. This dissertation examines the role of aid in countries recovering from conflict by investigating the determinants and the time scale of post-conflict aid and its impact on outcomes of economic recovery. In so doing, this dissertation aims to enhance understanding of the role of foreign aid in post-conflict environments. It is timely in the context of reevaluation of aid effectiveness and increasing concerns about fragile states, whereby post-conflict countries are especially significant as they are less likely to meet MDGs; and yet, post-conflict countries attract aid from the same pool of donor funding, with other non-conflict countries. The analysis in this dissertation contributes to the ongoing debate on foreign aid effectiveness in three aspects. First, to trace temporal patterns of aid inflows and estimate their potential impact on recovery outcomes, I bring together both strands of aid literature: aid allocation and aid effectiveness. Second, under the same framework, I examine effectiveness issues through different recovery outcomes, such as economic growth, infant mortality, and good policy environment. Lastly, I combine cross-country and case study analysis. The findings of this analysis support the view that aid offsets negative effects of conflict on recipient societies. Although the effects of post-conflict aid on growth seem more ambiguous, in post-conflict settings, aid is more effective in saving lives, reconstructing physical and institutional infrastructure, and adopting good policies. These findings unravel the heterogeneous impact of post-conflict aid on different recovery outcomes and suggest the importance of generous aid flows during the early years after the conflict; better absorptive capacities of aid in later periods may not be attained if a country fails to build its institutions and reconstruct its social capital. Consequently, the time-sequencing of aid should be governed by multiple goals, if it is to attain an immediate peace dividend.

This thesis collects three independent essays. Two of them relate to experimental economics, and one to labor economics. The first essay explores through a laboratory experiment the relationship between cognitive costs and imitation dynamics. The second essay investigates in an experimental setting information aversion towards bad/good news about ones’ own condition, and tests the effect of the possibility of exerting effort, which may improve one’s own condition, on the willingness to acquire more detailed personal information. The third essay proposes an empirical application aiming at studying gender discrimination in a research context, and in particular whether the gender composition of evaluating commissions affects the hiring of women in research activities.

The main purpose of this thesis is to identify the role of sustainable development in Laos, based on the integration of three factors, economic growth, social development, and the environmental dimension. Annual time series data are used for the period 1980-2010. In order to generate the most appropriate regression, relevant theoretical and empirical studies are reviewed. This thesis contributes to the on-going research issue about key determinants influencing sustainable development in developing countries. Firstly, this study uses the first different of logarithm form to identify the determinants of economic growth, the impacts of growth on poverty and environmental conditions in Laos. However, using the multiple regressions, serious problems of multicollinearity were encountered and those results became less reliable. Principal components analysis (PCA) is a technique to handle the problem of multicollinearity and produce stable and meaningful estimates for regression coefficients. This thesis concludes that there are several variables, both internal and external factors, which have influenced the current economic growth of Laos. Particularly the internal factors (domestic investment, government expenditure, and industry) show their strong correlation with economic growth, while the external factor (participation in ASEAN) also plays an important role in economic growth. On the other hand, the other external factors (FDI, AID and OPEN) show a weaker link to domestic growth of Laos. In the long run, to ensure the effectiveness of external factors on domestic growth, this research suggests exploiting more effectively the opportunities provided by foreign direct investment, through the openness of the system to globalization and international trade, together with better management of aid allocation. The impacts of economic growth on poverty and environmental conditions are then considered, questioning whether economic growth leads to the reduction of poverty and whether it produces a pressure on environmental conditions. This study found that those determinants not only have been dominant in economic growth, but they do indeed correlate with a reduction in the level of poverty. On the other hand, the increase in economic activities leads to increased environmental damage. This research supports continuing the adjustment of domestic activity investment, government expenditure, improving trade openness system, foreign direct investment, aid allocation, ASEAN, and so on. These factors can help the country to grow and poverty to diminish but we have also to pay attention to their impacts on the environment. Sustainable development would achieve its goal only if these internal and external factors contribute to economic growth, where this growth is distributed across the entire population, together with environmental protection conditions. In order to attain the goal of sustainable development, strong environmental and natural resource protection policies are suggested. To maintain a high rate of economic growth, this study suggests considering the natural resources and the areas with the greatest potential to be utilized for growth; such as tourism sustainability, human resource improvement and trade policy improvement. To improve social development, reduce the development gap and eradicate extreme poverty, it is suggested that community participation development, gender promotion, and investment in social services be increased especially in rural areas.

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.

Chapter II: No extant study addresses the persistent detrimental effect of in utero exposure to conflict in countries experiencing protracted conflict. I therefore estimate the impact of in utero conflict exposure on weight-for-age z-score (WAZ) by applying instrumental variable regression to information on Afghan children aged 0-59 months merged with data on district-level fatalities during the intrauterine period. Although like previous research, I find an overall negative effect of violence on WAZ, the effect is stronger for children born in districts where long-term conflict is on average comparatively lower. I attribute these heterogeneous effects to the fact that households living in environments of constant conflict have developed more effective coping strategies. I support this result by showing that physical insecurity in districts in which opium poppy is cultivated, a coping strategy for rural farmers, has a comparatively smaller negative effect on household wealth because of the lower risk of eradication. Chapter III: Although Afghanistan experienced a slight rise in female literacy and some decline in female and infant mortality between 2000 and 2015, these improvements were not great enough to explain the simultaneous dramatic drop in total fertility, from 7.5 to 4.6. In this study, therefore, I test the previously unverified hypothesis that long-term conflict has a negative causal impact on both fertility outcomes and fertility preferences. More specifically, by applying 2SRI GLM Poisson regressions to cross-sectional data for a subsample of ever-married women of reproductive age (15-49) combined with georeferenced information on district level conflict from 1979 to 2015, I estimate the causal impact on fertility of conflict experienced since the time of first union. I find that although long-term conflict does indeed reduce the number of pregnancies and living children, when a woman’s ideal number of children desired over the lifetime is used as the dependent variable, conflict is a relatively small (albeit still statistically significant) determinant of fertility preferences. This finding implies that, given the only modest improvements in women’s health and development, the drop in Afghanistan’s total fertility rate would slow down if the conflict were to cease. Chapter IV (a joint work with Peng Nie and Alfonso Sousa-Poza): This study uses biomarker information from the 2013 National Nutrition Survey Afghanistan and satellite precipitation driven modeling results from the Global Flood Monitoring System to analyze how floods affect the probability of anemia in Afghan women of reproductive age (15–49). In addition to establishing a causal relation between the two by exploiting the quasi-random variation of floods in different districts and periods, the analysis demonstrates that floods have a significant positive effect on the probability of anemia through two possible transmission mechanisms. The first is a significant effect on inflammation, probably related to water borne diseases carried by unsafe drinking water, and the second is a significant negative effect on retinol concentrations. Because the effect of floods on anemia remains significant even after we control for anemia’s most common causes, we argue that the condition may also be affected by elevated levels of psychological stress.

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.