This thesis contains four closely related essays which address the empirical issues pertaining to the causes, consequences, and households’ responses to food price shocks in Uganda. The first essay investigates the nature of volatilities in agricultural commodity prices in Uganda between 2000 and 2012 by focusing on six key food staples, namely matooke, cassava, maize, sweet potatoes, beans, and millet flour. It studies the behavior of monthly price volatilities of these commodities, examines the extent of their volatility spillovers, identifies their macroeconomic and environmental drivers, and uncover their differential impacts using respectively the General Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedastic (GARCH), the Vector Autoregressive (VAR) and the Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) models. I find evidence that both unconditional and conditional price volatilities have significantly increased since January 2008 for most commodities, period of turmoil in the global food markets. The GARCH (1, 1) estimates indicate a strong persistence in volatility for most commodities while results from the Exponential GARCH (1, 1) models suggest the presence of asymmetric and leverage effects of unexpected price shocks for half of the commodities. In addition, the VAR estimation results detect limited and mostly unidirectional spillover effects across food commodities. Finally, historical price volatilities of most commodities are found to be primarily affected by volatilities in consumer price indices, fuel prices, and rainfall, with less evidence of strong seasonality effects as previously reported. The second essay presents an empirical analysis of the welfare impacts of food price changes in Uganda using three waves of the Uganda National Panel Surveys (UNPS) spanning over the years 2005-2011. It theoretically investigates the implications of labor market imperfections and households’ heterogeneity in terms of their net positions in both food and labor markets and compares welfare estimates between separable and non-separable models. Through the estimations a panel stochastic production frontier function and a censored-Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand Systems (QUAIDS) with expenditure and shadow wage endogeneities, the results suggest that the welfare effects of price changes (measured in terms of compensating variations) were globally lower in the non-separable agricultural model, implying a high degree of labor market frictions. Furthermore, I find that the welfare effects were unevenly distributed both within and between household groups. Particularly, although agricultural households benefited from price increases as a group between 2005/6 and 2009/10, both significant and insignificant net buyers did suffer from price changes. Moreover, results from non-parametric estimations show that households at the extremes of the welfare distribution were more severely hit by food price instabilities than others. Finally, the essay suggests that the important dynamics in the net market positions observed during the sample period might be attributed to a cost-benefit analysis related to the potential welfare effects of food prices. The third essay explores the question of crop choices and land allocations in environments where farmers face uncertainties about end-of-season output prices and yield levels, weather variability, and formulate expectations about their future levels. Indeed, in the absence of credit and/or insurance markets, farmers are widely expected to adjust their land allocation decisions as a management tool against agricultural and market-related risks. However, little is actually known about the likely differential effects of each of these risk components on farmers’ decisions, particularly when current decisions are allowed to depend on previous choices. Using a nationally representative panel data set for agricultural households in Uganda spanning over the years 2005 – 2012, the paper proposes to investigate the role played by both price and yield risks on farmers’ crop choices and area allocations using a multivariate generalization of the Heckman-type two-step procedure: a multivariate crop selection and a conditional acreage share models. The crop selection problem is modeled as a dynamic multivariate probit regression and estimated through Simulated Maximum Likelihood and the Geweke Hajivassiliou Keane simulator, whereas the conditional acreage share model is estimated using a dynamic multivariate fractional logit model. In both the multivariate crop selection and acreage share models, the results reveal that, while own expected prices and yields are among the main drivers of farmers' crop choices and land share allocations, farmers are found to be more sensitive to changes in expected yield levels than in expected end-of-season output prices. In addition, yield risks, temperature and rainfall volatility appear to have more impact on acreage share decisions than market price risks. Finally, household characteristics are found to play a marginal role in explaining farmers’ crop selection and acreage allocation decisions. The fourth and last essay develops a modified standard Ramsey model to analyze households’ welfare growth and test the assumption that differential exposure to food price shocks leads to different welfare trajectories and to potentially increased risks of poverty traps. The essay focuses on two welfare indicators, namely consumption levels and asset indices, and employs a battery of econometric methods, ranging from parametric GMM fixed effects models to locally weighted scatterplot smoother (LOWESS), local polynomial regressions, and Ruppert et al’s (2003) semi-parametric penalized splines to address nonlinearities in welfare dynamics, identify and locate critical welfare thresholds, and test for the presence of single against multiple welfare equilibria. Using the full sample, I find nonlinearities in welfare dynamic paths and reduction in the growth rates of both consumption levels and assets holdings as a consequence of exposure to food price and asset shocks. However, there is no evidence of poverty traps caused by households’ exposure or vulnerability to food price shocks, but instead I identify only a single dynamic stable equilibrium, located slightly above the official poverty, towards which Ugandan households are converging in the long run. Finally, when disaggregating households into different sub-groups sharing similar characteristics, the empirical results reveal that Ugandan households are converging towards specific welfare equilibria, depending on their initial conditions, demographic characteristics, the extent of their vulnerability and differential exposure to food price shocks. Particularly, I found that, households exposed to food price shocks or above the vulnerability threshold index are expected to move in the long run to welfare equilibria located at lower levels than their unexposed or less vulnerable counterparts.

The analysis of the complex and fast changing technological processes which today are summarized in the term ‘Industry 4.0’ reveals that the industrial system is shifting towards a new technological paradigm (Perez, 2009; 2010), implying systemic transformations at micro, meso and macro levels of analysis (Geels, 2005). These radical transformations are deeply changing the way products, production processes and business models are conceived, questioning the traditional separation between manufacturing and services, and making it more and more important for firms to adopt a collaborative approach to innovation (Hagedoorn et al., 2000). This rapid technological advance implies the need for the socio-economic players to adopt new strategic and operational measures in order to prevent the loss of competitive advantage of national and regional innovation systems. The recent debate on industrial policies shows that a mission-oriented industrial policy approach (Mazzucato, 2014; European Commission, 2018) may provide interesting inspirational principles able to guide these transformations, since it places at the centre of its reasoning the key role of the public actor able to stimulate the strategic coordination between multiple socio-economic players at different levels (Mazzucato and Perez, 2014; Rodrik, 2004). According to this approach, Public-Private research Partnerships, are assumed to be effective vehicles of governance able to improve technological development, stimulating strong links between the relevant socio-economic players and thus increasing the national and regional systems’ overall innovative potential (Mazzucato, 2014; Rodrik, 2004; 2014; Robin and Schubert, 2013; Kristensen and Scherrer, 2016). The aim of the present work is to understand how the strategic coordination between public and private players may be an opportunity for the definition of effective innovation policies in the context of the current socio-technical transition. In order to reach this purpose, a multilevel approach (Geels, 2005) is adopted, taking into account both the national and the regional levels of analysis. A quantitative analysis is provided at national level in order to understand the relationship between a specific approach to innovation and technology policy, the overall innovation performance and the level of diffusion of cooperative innovation activities in a National Innovation System (Lundvall, 1988); moreover, it contributes to the existing literature on Public-Private research Partnerships (Hagedoorn et al., 2000) by testing the effectiveness of some main variables at industry and company level explaining the propensity of companies to get involved in formal cooperative innovation activities. This analysis is made taking into account data stemming from the 8th wave of the Community Innovation Survey, 2010-2012. Moreover, the results of a field research conducted at regional level are presented, aiming at understanding the elements of an institutional/organizational framework which are able to positively influence technological local development. In this case, the analysis takes into account a Regional Innovation System (Cooke et al., 1997): the Autonomous Province of Trento. Data have been gathered through both primary sources, based on 57 semi-structured interviews to local institutions and firms, and secondary sources, based on relevant documents and reports. The major conclusion of the present work is that, given the systemic nature of this socio-technical transition, only a mission-oriented policy approach to innovation policy based on strategic Public-Private research Partnerships may be able to trigger the necessary cross-level synergies between the different socio-economic players involved, managing the important challenges lying behind these transformations.

This thesis includes three main chapters that are the outcome of different research projects. All chapters stand as independent papers, but they are linked by the common focus on firm financial factors and export behavior, and by the use of microeconometric methodologies applied to firm-level data. The first two chapters investigate, respectively, the impact of export activity on firms’ access to credit and the role of corporate financial structure as a determinant of exporters’ ability to compete on foreign markets through quality. The third chapter looks instead at the scope for promoting investment and exports of small and medium enterprises through the introduction of more favorable Corporate Taxation rates.

Improving agricultural productivity, agricultural commercialization and improving the livelihoods of the population are the main challenges in the Sub-Saharan Africa region where the majority of the population are poor and live in rural areas. Several factors including lack of improved farming practices, poor infrastructure, low level of market integration to the world market and within countries, climate change, and inadequate policy support restrained the performance of the agricultural sector in the region. This thesis consists of four chapters, three empirical and one theoretical chapter. Each of the empirical chapters deals with selected topics pertinent to the agriculture sector in Ethiopia. The theoretical chapter reviews the agricultural policies adopted by the existing government and implemented over the past two decades. After the introductory chapter, the second chapter analyzes the impacts of climate change on crop yields and yield vari-ability in Ethiopia. The impacts of climate change appear to be different across crops and regions. However, the future crop yield levels largely depend on future technological development in farming practices. The third chapter aims to understand the extent of price transmissions from the world markets to domestic grain markets, and the extent of market integration in domestic grain markets. The fourth chapter investigates and compares the volatilities of oilseeds prices in the world and domestic markets. The data used in the second, third and fourth chapters are obtained from various secondary sources. The fifth chapter reviews major agricultural policies implemented over the last two decades and identifies policies that either enhanced the growth of the agricultural sector or holding back its performance. The sixth chapter underlines the main conclusions and indicates future research areas.

Financial constraints and limited access to markets are the most important obstacles for economic development in developing economies that are largely dependent on agriculture. Lack of access to credit and output markets, in particular, is frequently identified as a key barrier to transformation of subsistence agriculture. The fundamental problems are related to information asymmetry, lack of collateral and limited economies of scale. Innovative institutional mechanisms, in the form of microfinance and producer organizations, offer ways to address information asymmetry and increase scale economies. This dissertation examines the outreach, financial performance and impact of microfinance institutions as well as the key drivers of agricultural cooperatives and its impact on smallholder farmers efficiency in Ethiopia. To meet these objectives four data sets from Ethiopia, one institutional and three household survey data, are used. The analysis of microfinance generally focuses on examining the trade-offs between outreach to the poor and financial sustainability by ownership forms (shareholder owned vs. memberowned). The outreach-financial sustainability trade-offs analyzed first using the institutional survey data. The empirical results show that serving the poor and financial sustainability are challenging objectives to achieve together. There is also evidence that suggests the presence of mission drift. Second, the role of ownership form on outreach, financial performance and cost-efficiency is analyzed within the framework of efficient ownership assignment theories using regression and stochastic cost frontier approaches. This analysis aims at testing whether the commonly held proposition of greater efficiency of shareholder firms in microfinance by policy advocates is empirically supported. The results reject the superiority of shareholder-owned microfinance over financial cooperatives. In fact, the evidence here supports the advantages of member-owned microfinance on cost efficiency and balancing the double bottom-lines of microfinance. Third, the impact of access to microfinance credit on farmers investment on agricultural inputs is assessed using propensity score matching (PSM) and control-function-regression methods that address potential participation selection biases. Results from both approaches show that access to credit increased the use of productivity enhancing inputs among borrower farmers. Indeed, farmers that borrow from financial cooperatives tend to invest more on modern inputs. The analysis of agricultural cooperatives tested theoretical propositions from organizational and the new institutional economics theories on the drivers of agricultural cooperatives incidence and farmers membership and patronage decisions. Discrete choice models are employed for the empirical analysis. The results indicate that the incidence of agricultural cooperatives in Ethiopia is more related to the countervailing market power argument than to the transaction cost reduction hypothesis. Despite open membership polices, the analysis on farmers participation indicates that membership and patronage decisions are related and significantly influenced by location, asset and relational specificities. Finally, the impact analysis estimated technical efficiency gains of membership in agricultural cooperatives and employed matching and stochastic production frontier techniques. The evidence suggests that membership in agricultural cooperatives significantly enhances efficiency gains among smallholder farmers.

Eco-innovation is crucial for companies to balance environmental compliance with profitability. It involves implementing more efficient resource use and reducing harmful environmental effects. However, eco-innovation requires significant resources and corporate commitment. This thesis examines how sustainability affects firms’ performance and how some firms’ structures influence this relationship. Three articles are included: one studies the moderating role of the supply chain network in the relationship between corporate environmental and financial performance; the second studies how board gender diversity impacts eco-innovation through a moderated mediation model introducing the CSR committee as a mediator and board-independent members as a moderator; and the third studies the link between eco-innovation and productivity in reducing GHG emissions.

The present work is organized in five chapters and it proposes and applies alternative measures of productivity constructed using input-output tables and based mainly on the Sraffian scheme. The first three chapters of the thesis are devoted to the development and the empirical application of new productivity measures. These chapters form the main part of the work. The last two chapters are devoted to sensitivity analysis. In the first chapter, entitled †̃Productivity accounting based on production pricesâ€TM an alternative method of productivity accounting is proposed. By using input–output tables from four major OECD countries between 1970 and 2000, we compute the associated wage-profit frontiers and the net national products curves, and from these we derive two measures of productivity growth based on production prices and a chosen numeraire. The findings support the general conclusions in the existing literature on the productivity slowdown and later rebound, and supply new important insights to the extent and timing of these events. The second chapter is entitled †̃New measures of sectoral productivityâ€TM. The objective of this chapter is to propose alternative methods of sectoral productivity accounting based the theoretical work of Goodwin (1976), Gossling (1972), Pasinetti (1973), and Sraffa (1960). The indexes developed in this study differ from the standard indexes of productivity because they are designed on the basis of some of the following desiderable features: take into account the interconnections among economic sectors, aggregate heterogeneous goods by using production prices, and compute productivity by using quantity of goods instead of their values. These indexes are then be tested empirically by computing productivity of four major OECD countries. The third chapter is entitled †̃Productivity in the Italian regions: development of Alternative Indicators based on input-output tablesâ€TM. This chapter calculates indices of aggregate productivity, sectoral productivity, and technological progress for a selected sample of Italian regions. Besides these indices, two different versions of the so-called technological frontier were calculated. The contemporary frontiers that are constructed from all the production techniques extracted from the regional input-output tables in a given year and the intertemporal frontier that is computed for the full set of techniques available over time and across regions. The availability of the technological frontiers allows the calculation of the recently developed Velupillai-Fredholm-Zambelli indices of convergence (Fredholm and Zambelli, 2009) that are based on the distance between the region-specific wage-profit frontiers and the technological frontiers. Given the important role played by the production prices, this chapter also examines the price curves for each region and industry and it identifies remarkable regularities. Not surprisingly, analyses of the findings reveal that there is a productivity gap between the regions of North and South. However, the analysis of sectoral productivity reveals two important facts. The first is that the techniques of some industries are more productive in the South than in the North. The second, who follows from the first, is that all regions could therefore improve productivity through greater integration. Chapter four is entitled †̃An Inquiry into the choice of Numeraireâ€TM. This chapter has several objectives. The main aim is to examine the robustness of the results obtained by applying the new approach to measuring productivity if we change the numeraire chosen. However, it should be mentioned that the problem of the choice of numeraire is a general one and for this reason, the chapter also proposes universal guidelines to be followed in choosing the numeraire and in testing the robustness of the results to changes in the numeraire. Finally, chapter five is entitled †̃An Inquiry into the effect of aggregation of input-output tablesâ€TM. The aim of this chapter is to test the robustness of the results from a progressive aggregation of the input-output tables.

The Twin Transitions (TT) concept highlights the interconnection between the green transition, geared toward achieving climate goals, and the digital transition, aimed at disseminating digital technologies and infrastructures. These objectives are fundamental for the long run competitiveness of economic systems. Even though various EU strategic documents and a part of the scientific literature assume the two transitions to be mutually reinforcing, the effective sustainability of the TT is endangered by two issues of environmental nature: the dependence of modern technologies on specific mineral resources and the management of end-of-life technologies, that is electronic waste. Circular Economy (CE) strategies, ultimately aimed at decoupling techno-economic systems from the use of natural resources and at a minimization of human-induced environmental impacts, emerge as a tool to address both issues. Throughout the thesis, this overarching research theme has evolved into three lines of activity: 1) analysis of the relationship between recent technological trajectories and mineral resources consumption; 2) review of the literature on Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) to investigate its rationale, policy makers expectations and, focusing on the specific case of electronic waste, its impacts in environmental and innovation terms; 3) empirical analysis of the relationship between EPR on batteries and international trade of waste. The project embraces the multidisciplinary and multidimensionality nature of sustainability analysis, by linking various streams of literature (Innovation studies, Ecological Economics, International Economics, Environmental Economics) and types of data (international trade, patents, waste management, resources extraction, material composition of technologies, scientific production). Ultimately, the project elucidates how both market-driven and policy-led CE strategies can engender structural changes capable of driving, at least partially, the Twin Transition dynamics toward achieving effective sustainability outcomes.

The aim of this thesis is to analyse the potential effects of the planned Brenner Pass opening in 2028. The thesis is divided into 3 studies: in the first, we will provide a methodological description of possible approaches to be used in this type of analysis. In the second, we will propose an experiment to understand if it is possible to exploit the default effect to induce a modal shift towards the most sustainable means of transportation: the train. In the third study, we will conduct a simulation by applying the model constructed by Monte et al in 2018. The simulation results demonstrate that the opening of the Brenner Base Tunnel will lead to an increase in welfa re in the Trentino Alto Adige region (+0.2%), along with other socio economic changes such as increased commuting and housing costs. Theresults of the second study highlight the potential of a simple policy based on the default effect, pushing over half ( 54%) of the participants to repeatedly choose the most sustainable option.

This thesis is a collection of three essays in causal evaluation. The first chapter investigates the effects of formal ties between firms and banks on the amount of credit received. I focus on the micro-effects of ties (bank-firm level) and how they reverberate at the macro level. Results are consistent with the literature considering links as a source of favoritism. However, efficient firms are more likely to be connected to banks, thus benefiting more often than less efficient firms from connections. The comparison of Portugal’s GDP in 2017 with that produced under a hypothetical scenario where every tie was severed shows that severing links results in virtually no changes in GDP. I interpret the result as evidence that the different likelihood of being connected experienced by efficient and not efficient firms counterbalances the misallocating potential of connections.The second chapter introduces a novel Stata implementation of Egger and von Ehrlich’s (2013) econometric framework for the estimation of treatment effect when the treatment is continuous and multidimensional. After the illustration of the package, I present a simple simulation to show the capability of the method to overcome bias.The third chapter consists of an evaluation of European regional policy. It analyzes how different mixes of investments in infrastructure and productive investments affect regions’ growth rate. The main results are that allocations in infrastructure foster growth only when coupled with expenditures in productive investments. Moreover, the highest growth is obtained when investments have high intensity in both dimensions. By generating two hypothetical scenarios, I investigate how the allocation of funds can be improved. The results show that regions could allocate more efficiently. However, the actual transfer intensity is not enough to choose the mix that would globally maximize growth. The findings are consistent with Becker et al. (2012) since enforcing common support restricts the analysis to regions with low transfer intensity.