Denmark and Norway have more explicit syllabuses for English as a Foreign Language and more time allocated to EFL than Sweden. If measures have been taken to improve the syllabus and to increase time for EFL in these countries, do these measures need to be taken in Sweden too? This study aims to explore time allocation and the use of Content and Language Integrated Learning approaches in the primary school years 1-3 in Sweden. 114 teachers participated in this study through a web-based questionnaire. The findings show that teachers experience time constraints associated with EFL, and a third of the respondents state that they compensate for the time constraints associated with EFL through CLIL approaches. However, whether or not CLIL is indeed present in primary school years 1-3 is difficult to decide, due to the lack of a common frame of reference for CLIL in Sweden and in primary schools, as well as the contextual variables that affect and shape EFL and CLIL. Little, if any, research into the effects of CLIL in years 1-3 in Sweden has been carried out, so this study might help to highlight possible areas of interest for future research and prompt further exploration of the field.

Transportation economists apply different labor supply models when studying anti-congestion policy: (i) endogenous working hours; (ii) endogenous workdays but given daily working hours; (iii) labor supply as a residual. We study whether the outcome of anti-congestion policies that change the relative cost of labor supply margins, and, thus, may affect decisions on working hours and working days, is robust against the model applied. In particular, we focus on welfare implications in the presence of other taxes when there is a congestion externality. We find surprisingly strong differences in quantity and sign. Further, we develop a clear recommendation for future research on issues that include decisions on commuting trips. Researchers shall apply both a model of endogenous working hours that provides an upper limit and a model of endogenous workdays that provide a lower limit of results for welfare changes, optimal policies and two optimal tax components (Pigouvian and Ramsey terms).

The transport and urban economics literature applies different labor supply approaches when studying economic or planning instruments. Some studies assume that working hours are endogenous while the number of workdays is given, whereas others model only decisions on workdays. Unfortunately, empirical evidence does hardly exist on account of missing data. Against this background, we provide an assessment of whether general effects of transport policies are robust against the modeling of leisure demand and labor supply. We introduce different labor supply approaches into a spatial general equilibrium model and discuss how they affect the welfare implication of congestion policies. We, then, perform simulations and find that in many cases the choice of labor supply modeling not only affects the magnitude of the policy impact but also its direction. While planning instruments are suggested to be quite robust to different labor supply approaches, the way of modeling labor supply may crucially affect the overall welfare implications of economic instruments such as congestion tolls. Based on these findings it becomes clear which labor supply approach is the most appropriate given specific conditions. Our study also emphasizes the need for better micro labor market data that also feature days of sickness, overtime work used to reduce workdays, the actual number of leave days, part-time work, days with telecommuting etc.

Certaines ressources ne peuvent pas être échangées sur le marché mais elles peuvent être valorisées par les prix virtuels. Je dérive théoriquement 3 types de prix virtuels dont j'estime structurellement la valeur au niveau individuel afin d'analyser leurs effets sur le comportement et le bien-être des individus. J'apparie statistiquement les enquêtes Consumer Expenditure et American Time Use en utilisant une procédure d'appariement qui résout les faiblesses des procédures standards. Premièrement, j'estime le prix virtuel du temps qui nécessite des étapes permettant l'estimation d'une fonction d'utilité, qui dépend du temps et des biens marchands, que j'utilise comme une nouvelle mesure de bien-être. Les résultats montrent que la réallocation du temps a permis d'absorber 30% de l'effet néfaste de la Grande Récession. Je calcule ensuite le prix virtuel de 5 activités (produites par le consommateur), telles que le loisir et l'alimentation, afin d'estimer les élasticités des utilisations du temps (y compris l'offre de travail) et de la demande d'activité par rapport au revenu complet, au prix virtuel du temps, au prix virtuel des activités, au salaire, et au prix des biens marchands. Le troisième prix virtuel que j'aborde fournit le coût du sous-emploi/chômage en fonction de caractéristiques individuelles. Cela permet d'évaluer le coût d'opportunité des politiques d'emplois et de déterminer le niveau des allocations chômage. Finalement, je propose une reformulation de la théorie des normes sociales où j'analyse les déterminants de la désobéissance aux normes sociales ; et l'effet de la désobéissance sur les prix virtuels, le comportement individuel et, enfin, sur la croissance. / Many resources cannot be exchanged and priced on the markets but they can be valued by shadow prices. In this thesis, I theoretically derive 3 kinds of shadow prices and structurally estimate them at the individual level to analyze their effects on the behavior and the welfare of individuals. I combine the consumer expenditure and the American time use surveys (2004-2012) using a statistical matching procedure that overcomes the shortcomings of standard procedures. I first estimate the shadow price of time, which involves several steps where a utility function is estimated as a proxy for a new kind of well-being measure that depends on the amounts of time and market goods: it is shown that the reallocation of the forgone market work hours absorbed 30% of the Great Recession's negative welfare impact. Then, I compute the shadow prices of 5 home-produced activities (e.g., leisure and food) to estimate the elasticities of the time allocation functions (including the labor supply) and the demand elasticities of the activities with respect to the full income, the shadow price of time, the shadow price of the activities, the wage rate, and the price of market goods. The third shadow price addressed in this thesis yields the costs of under/unemployment as a function of demographic characteristics, which is essential for evaluating the opportunity cost of unemployment policies and for setting the level of unemployment benefits. Finally, I propose a reformulation of the theory of social norms where I analyze the determinants of the disobedience level to social norms along the effects of the disobedience on shadow prices, individuals' behavior, and, eventually, on economic growth.

La schizophrénie est caractérisée par un ensemble de symptômes positifs et négatifs ainsi que par des déficits cognitifs dont les éléments les plus handicapants sont les troubles mnésiques. La métamémoire, qui est la connaissance sur la mémoire, est un champ d’investigation prometteur pour la compréhension et la remédiation de ce trouble. La métamémoire est composée d’un processus évaluatif et d’un processus de régulation du comportement qui sont en interaction. Les études précédentes ont montré que l’évaluation serait préservée dans la schizophrénie alors que la régulation serait déficitaire. Cependant, les relations entre ces processus n’ont pas été examinées alors qu’elles pourraient permettre decompenser le déficit mnésique. Les objectifs de ce travail étaient donc d’une part, d’observer ces relations entre évaluation et régulation dans la schizophrénie, ainsi que les ressources cognitives liées à ces processus. D’autre part, afin d’étendre les connaissances fondamentales sur la métamémoire, nous souhaitions observer l’utilisation de différents types de matériels etde stratégies d’apprentissage chez des participants sains. Les deux premières expériences ont permis de montrer que les patients schizophrènes étaient capables d’utiliser l’évaluation de leur apprentissage pour adapter leur stratégie de mémorisation et que leurs déficits en mémoire étaient liés à d’autres fonctions cognitives. Les cinq expériences suivantes ont confirmé que les participants sains ne prenaient pas en compte de la même manière les caractéristiques intrinsèques et extrinsèques du matériel dans leurs jugements et leurs stratégies. Ces données sont discutées et indiquent que davantage de recherches sur la métamémoire dans la schizophrénie seraient d’un grand intérêt pour la prise en charge des troubles mnésiques de ces patients. / Schizophrenia is characterized by a range of positive and negative symptoms and bycognitive deficits including the most disabling one, memory. Metamemory, which is knowledge about memory is of particular interest for the understanding and remediation of this trouble. It involves a monitoring and a control process, which would be in interaction.Previous studies have shown that monitoring is spared whereas control is impaired. However,these relations between these processes have not been examined whereas they could compensate for memory deficit. The aims of this work were to observe these relations between monitoring and control in schizophrenia and cognitive resources linked to these processes on the one hand. On the other hand, we wished to observe the use of different kinds of materials and learning strategies in healthy participants to get better fundamental knowledge about metamemory. Two experiments showed that patients were able to use monitoring to adapt their learning strategy and also that their memory deficits were linked too ther cognitive functions. Five following experiments confirmed that healthy participants do not use intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics of the materials in the same way when makin gjudgments and using strategies. These data are discussed and point out that more research about metamemory in schizophrenia is of interest for the remediation of memory deficits inschizophrenia patients.

La tesi è una raccolta di tre articoli sugli effetti delle politiche per l’infanzia e le scelte dei genitori circa l’utilizzo dell’asilo nido sullo sviluppo cognitivo dei bambini. Il primo capitolo presenta una rassegna degli studi più recenti sul tema, considerando in particolare le analisi che hanno valutato gli effetti di politiche per l’infanzia e il ruolo della partecipazione pubblica nella gestione del servizio. Il secondo capitolo esplora la relazione tra la disponibilità di asili nido in Italia e i risultati scolastici dei bambini misurati dai test INVALSI relativi all’anno scolastico 2009-10. Il terzo capitolo analizza gli effetti delle scelte materne di lavoro e uso del child care sullo sviluppo cognitivo del bambino tramite la stima di un modello strutturale. / This thesis is composed by three chapters, dealing with the effects of policies for young children and parental child care decisions on subsequent child’s cognitive development. The first chapter presents a review of the most recent studies on this topic, considering in particular analyses that focus on public child care policies. The second chapter investigates the relationship between child care coverage in Italy and children’s scholastic achievement, as measured by the INVALSI test scores for the school year 2009-10. The third chapter evaluates the effects of maternal decisions concerning work and external child care use on subsequent child’s cognitive outcomes defining and estimating a behavioral model.

El objetivo del presente trabajo de investigación es evaluar si la tenencia de activos relacionados a las actividades domésticas afecta la oferta de trabajo infantil y la demanda de educación. Esto se lleva a cabo considerando que la producción doméstica es parte del trabajo infantil, así como lo es el trabajo en el mercado. Por lo tanto, se emplea un modelo Logit multivariado para estimar la relación entre activos y gastos del hogar; y la actividad principal de las niñas y niños en los hogares peruanos. Es así como se determina que los menores en hogares equipados con cocina, lavadora y acceso constante al servicio de agua tienen menos probabilidades de trabajar y más posibilidades de dedicarse únicamente a estudiar. Esto ocurre ya que los activos y características contemplados simplifican las actividades domésticas y reducen la incidencia de deserción escolar. / The objective of this research work is to evaluate if the possession of assets related to domestic activities affects the supply of child labor and the demand for education. This is done considering that domestic production is part of child labor, just like the job market. Therefore, a multivariate Logit model is used to estimate the relationship between household assets and expenses, and the main activity of girls and boys in Peruvian households. This is how it is determined that minors in homes equipped with a kitchen, washing machine and constant access to water service, are less likely to work and more likely to dedicate their time exclusively to studying. This occurs because the assets and characteristics contemplated simplify domestic activities and reduce the incidence of school dropout. / Trabajo de investigación

A decade of growth and wealth generation in Russia ended in 2009 with the collapse in GDP and rising unemployment. This Great Recession added new economic challenges to the ‘old’ problems facing children and families, including widening income inequalities and the phenomenon of social orphanage. One question is how the new and existing material pressures affect parent–child relationships. This research contributes to the answer by examining, in aggregate terms, the role poverty plays in the allocation of parental time in this emerging economy. Utilising a nationally representative sample of children, it explores how child interactions with parents are affected by aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks. Drawing on the rational choice paradigm and its critique, we put forward the Parental Time Equilibrium as an analytical guide to the study. This theoretical approach presents individual decisions concerning time spent with children over the long term as the product of a defined equilibrium between resources and demands for involvement. We test this approach through pooled cross-sectional and panel analyses based on the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey dataset from 2007 to 2009. Children in low-income households face the double disadvantage of a lack of money and time investments at home, with both persistent and transient poverty being associated with lower than average parental time inputs in the sample. Moreover, while on average, we find that children do maintain the amount of time they spend with their parents under conditions of severe financial strain, low–income children lose out on play time with the mother. Material resources cannot be considered in isolation from structural disadvantages, of which rural location in particular is detrimental for parent–child time together. The study demonstrates that the cumulative stress of adverse macro-economic conditions and depleted material resources makes it difficult for parents to sustain their human investment in children. The evidence this study provides on the associations between economic stress and pa-rental time allocations advances our knowledge of the disparities of in the childhood experience in modern Russian society. The findings strongly support the equal importance of available resources and basic demand for involvement, thus drawing policy attention to the need to address both in the best interests of children.

This thesis contributes to two completely unrelated debates in the economic literature, similar only in the relatively high degree of controversy characterizing each one. <p>The first part is methodological and macroeconomic in nature, addressing the question of whether the distribution of income across countries is converging (i.e. are the poor catching up to the rich?) or diverging (i.e. are we witnessing the formation of two exclusive clubs, one for poor countries and another one for rich countries?). Applications of the simple Markov model to this question have generated evidence in favor of the divergence hypothesis. In the first chapter, I critically review these results. I use statistical inference to show that the divergence results are not statistically robust, and I explain that this instability of the results comes from the application of a model for discrete data to data that is actually continuous. In the second chapter, I reposition the whole convergence-divergence debate by placing it in the context of Silverman’s classic survey of non-parametric density estimation techniques. This allows me to use the basic notions of fuzzy logic to adapt the simple Markov chain model to continuous data. When I apply the newly adapted Markov chain model to the cross-country distribution question, I find evidence against the divergence hypothesis, and this evidence is statistically robust. <p>The second part of the thesis is empirical and microeconomic in nature. I question whether observed differences between husbands’ and wives’ participation in labor markets are due to different preferences or to different constraints. My identification strategy is based on the idea that the more power an individual has relative to his/her partner, the more his/her actions will reflect his/her preferences. I use 2001 PSID data on cohabiting couples to estimate a simultaneous equations model of the spousal time allocation decision. My results confirm the stylized fact that specialization and trade does not explain time allocation for couples in which the wife is the primary breadwinner, and suggest that power could provide a more general explanation of the observations. My results show that wives with relatively more power choose to work more on the labor market and less at home, whereas husbands with more power choose to do the opposite. Since women start out from a lower level of labor market participation than men do, it would seem that spouses’ agree that the ideal mix of market work and housework lies somewhere between the husbands’ and the wives’ current positions. / Doctorat en sciences économiques, Orientation économie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Pendant des décennies, les économistes se sont intéressés à étudier pourquoi et comment les agents s'entraident, en accordant une place particulière à l'analyse des transferts de revenus privés. Les applications récentes comprennent des sujets très divers tels que: l'analyse de l'accumulation du capital, la cohésion sociale etla solidarité, le marché de l'assurance et des taux d'intérêt, les stratégies de gestion des risques face aux chocs négatifset les politiques gouvernementales.La présente thèse analyse de quelles manières les décisions de transfert entre ménages, les envois de fonds internationauxet les transferts intra-ménages ont un impact sur cinq aspects fondamentaux du développement:(i) les interactions sociales, (ii) le travail de marché et domestique, (iii) les dépenses, (iv) la nutrition et (v) la santé.Trois questions de recherche sont traitées en utilisant des données provenant de la Colombie, de l'Équateur et du Pérou, ainsi que de multiples techniques économétriques. Premièrement, y a-t-il une relation entre les transferts entre ménages et la distance entre les donateurs et les récepteurs? Deuxièmement, faire des envois de fonds internationaux modifie-t-il de manière asymétrique l'offre de travail, en fonction des caractéristiques individuelles? Troisièmement, avoir recours des transferts intra-ménages influence-t-il les habitudes de dépenses, la nutrition et la santé au sein des ménages?Les résultats suggèrent que les transferts de revenus privés jouent un rôle clé de redistribution, en modifiant leniveau de vie et en améliorant le bien-être des individus. Dans des contextes de pauvreté, où les mécanismes d'apparentant à une sécurité sociale sont rares, où l'informalité est courante, où les institutions sont fragmentées et où le secteur public est faible, les transferts d'argent et en nature entre ménages constituent des stratégies essentielles de subsistance. Ainsi, améliorer notre compréhension de cette dimension des comportements sociaux est fondamental. / For decades, economists have been interested in studying why and how agents support eachothers, giving a special place to the analysis of private income transfers. Recent applicationsinclude very diverse topics such as: the analysis of capital accumulation, social cohesion andsolidarity, market insurance and interest rates, risk-coping strategies against negative shocksand government policies.The present dissertation analyzes how inter-household transfer decisions, international remittancesand intra-household transfers contribute to shape five fundamental aspects of development:(i) social interactions, (ii) market and household work, (iii) spending patterns, (iv)nutrition and (v) health.Three research questions are addressed using applied data from Colombia, Ecuador and Peru,and multiple econometric techniques. First, is there a relationship between inter-householdtransfer dynamics and distance between donors and receivers? Second, do remittances asymmetricallyshape labor supply responses depending on people’s characteristics? Third, dointra-household transfers influence spending patterns, nutrition and health outcomes?Results suggest that private income transfers play a key re-distributive role, shaping agents’living standards and improving individual and social well-being. In contexts of economic deprivation,where social safety nets are scarce, informality is at stake, institutions are highlyfragmented and the public sector is weak, money and in-kind help from other households orindividuals constitute crucial livelihood strategies to get through the economic world. Thus,enhancing our understanding of this dimension of social behaviors is a must.