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Cette contribution propose un modèle théorique permettant d’identifier les tendances générales dans le mouvement des électeurs volatiles. Notre méthode permet à partir de données décentralisées de compléter les enquêtes d’opinions pour comprendre quelle part du résultat d’un parti provient d’électeurs fidèles conservés d’une élection à l’autre, et quelle part de l’électorat a été renouvelée. Elle peut également être utilisée à des fins prédictives :à partir d’un faible nombre de résultats provenant potentiellement de zones considérées comme peu représentatives, notre modèle permet d’extraire une tendance générale et de la reproduire sur l’ensemble d’un territoire donné. Nous proposons une typologie des résultats possibles des différents partis (gagnant, perdant, stable ou renouvelé). A titre d’illustration, nous appliquons ce modèle aux élections fédérales belges de 2010, en utilisant comme référence le résultat des élections régionales de 2009., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Dans l’espace politique bruxellois, l’élection fédérale du 13 juin 2010 n’a pas occasionné des mouvements de voix aussi spectaculaires qu’en Flandre ou qu’en Wallonie si l’on se réfère aux élections intervenues en 2007. Des changements importants s’y donnent néanmoins à voir, en particulier la progression du parti socialiste et le recul électoral du Mouvement réformateur. Il est néanmoins intéressant, dans le timing de la vie politique et électorale, de se reporter au dernier scrutin en date – les élections régionales bruxelloises de 2009 – pour analyser les mouvements intervenus dans le temps « court » de la vie politique, où cette dernière est rythmée par des événements et des changements qui affectent, parfois rapidement les perceptions et les représentations des partis et de la vie politique. Ce sont les mouvements entre l’élection régionale 2009 et l’élection fédérale de 2010 que nous analysons dans cette contribution. Le travail se fonde sur une enquête « sortie des urnes » organisée par le Centre d’étude de la vie politique de l’Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) auprès de 3.000 Bruxellois., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

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The thesis is dedicated to time series analysis for functional data and contains three original parts. In the first part, we derive statistical tests for the presence of a periodic component in a time series of functions. We consider both the traditional setting in which the periodic functional signal is contaminated by functional white noise, and a more general setting of a contaminating process which is weakly dependent. Several forms of the periodic component are considered. Our tests are motivated by the likelihood principle and fall into two broad categories, which we term multivariate and fully functional. Overall, for the functional series that motivate this research, the fully functional tests exhibit a superior balance of size and power. Asymptotic null distributions of all tests are derived and their consistency is established. Their finite sample performance is examined and compared by numerical studies and application to pollution data. In the second part, we consider vector autoregressive processes (VARs) with innovations having a singular covariance matrix (in short singular VARs). These objects appear naturally in the context of dynamic factor models. The Yule-Walker estimator of such a VAR is problematic, because the solution of the corresponding equation system tends to be numerically rather unstable. For example, if we overestimate the order of the VAR, then the singularity of the innovations renders the Yule-Walker equation system singular as well. Moreover, even with correctly selected order, the Yule-Walker system tends be close to singular in finite sample. We show that this has a severe impact on predictions. While the asymptotic rate of the mean square prediction error (MSPE) can be just like in the regular (non-singular) case, the finite sample behavior is suffering. This effect turns out to be particularly dramatic in context of dynamic factor models, where we do not directly observe the so-called common components which we aim to predict. Then, when the data are sampled with some additional error, the MSPE often gets severely inflated. We explain the reason for this phenomenon and show how to overcome the problem. Our numerical results underline that it is very important to adapt prediction algorithms accordingly. In the third part, we set up theoretical foundations and a practical method to forecast multiple functional time series (FTS). In order to do so, we generalize the static factor model to the case where cross-section units are FTS. We first derive a representation result. We show that if the first r eigenvalues of the covariance operator of the cross-section of n FTS are unbounded as n diverges and if the (r+1)th eigenvalue is bounded, then we can represent the each FTS as a sum of a common component driven by r factors and an idiosyncratic component. We suggest a method of estimation and prediction of such a model. We assess the performances of the method through a simulation study. Finally, we show that by applying our method to a cross-section of volatility curves of the stocks of S&P100, we have a better prediction accuracy than by limiting the analysis to individual FTS., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

My dissertation focuses on economics of higher education. Specifically, I study how scientists’ social network gives indications on their later career (Chapter 1), the universities’ research performance (Chapter2), and the overall production of research outputs (Chapter3). Building on the current surge of social network analysis, all the papers are built upon networks of co-authors. This thesis contributes to the study of social networks. It documents the prevalence of research collaborations and how they impact the production of science, making a case for taking this phenomenon into account when designing funding mechanisms. Chapter 1 looks at how a researcher’s professional network influences her career path, and I specifically consider the career of young economists on the American academic market. I exploit an original dataset building from the researchers’ individual vitae and their publication records. I investigate the impact of social network on career path by looking at the correlation between early career network metrics and the quality of the institutional affiliation of the researcher. I find that the number of social ties a researcher has as well as her relative position in the research network matters for explaining career mobility and success, even when controlling for publications. Having more co-authors boost the early career, while a higher quality of publications matters on the long run. In Chapter 2, I look at the impact of inter-university partnerships on the production of research outputs.Using an original data set of scientific publications and universities’ budgets, I analyze the network of research in Spain based on the network of Spanish co- authors. I show how the growth in research productivity of Spanish institutions before the crisis was linked to the increase in universities’ budgets and in inter- university collaborations. The results show that the size of the university is the key factor to understand universities productivity. The network multiplier is significant and positive, indicating that collaboration has a positive effect. Finally, in the context of the current crisis, I am able to identify the universities that are the least productive, taking into account their own characteristics and the indirect effects of the collaborations. This analysis has clear policy implications,as the least productive universities could be targeted to minimize the impact of further budgets cuts.Finally, Chapter 3 focuses on the link between the composition of the scientists’ workforce and the amount of research produced. Using Chapter 2’s dataset enriched by a list of the applicants to the two most prestigious postdoctoral grants in Spain, I am able to identify the young researchers in the co-authorship network. I study the link between the number of young researchers and the total research output. All three chapters show how important collaborations are in the production of science. The first chapter shows how some network metrics correlate with career outcomes, giving indication on how much to engage in collaborative work. The second paper shows how network analysis can be used to produce performance rankings of universities taking into account the partnerships. Finally, the third chapter makes a case for the importance of policies targeting young scientists. Further research can be done to understand the link between competition for students and resources and the co-authorship network, or the endogenous process of career changes and changes in the network., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Traditional economic theory assumes that individuals are self-interested. They only care about their own well-being and disregard the impact of their actions on the others. However, the assumption of selfish individuals is unable to explain a number of important phenomena and puzzles. Individuals frequently engage in actions that are costly to themselves with noapparent reward. Behavioural economics provides plausible explanations for these actions.Individuals can be “boundedly rational" (Simon, 1955, and Kahneman et al. 1982) and/or can be driven by altruistic, equity and reciprocity considerations (see for an overview Fehrand Schmidt, 2006). Over the past decade, researchers have applied behavioural economicsmodels to the study of organisations and how contracts should be designed in the presenceof non-standard preferences and asymmetric information or incomplete contracts (see foran overview of the literature Köszegi, 2014).In my current research, I try to be at the forefront of these new behavioural economicsapplications into traditional industrial organisation and contract theory themes. The usual prescriptions of standard models can be misleading if potential differences in the agents' preferences are overlooked. Behavioural economics can make great progress if it takes into proper accountmarket and organisational features., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Based on three essays, this Ph.D. thesis studies costly and truthful communication in the following situation: a sender (S) tries to convince a receiver (R) to accept a project. Before communication, both agents do not know the project quality. On the one hand, they believe with probability α that the project is of high quality and will raise R’s payoff by r_H, and otherwise that it is of low quality and will decrease R’s payoff by |r_L| (r_L < 0 < r_H). On the other hand, S earns s if R accepts the project. S has information that if understood by R, tells R whether the project is of high or low quality. Therefore, if S wants R to accept the project, S may need to communicate with R to resolve the uncertainty about the project quality. The communication between S and R may either fail or succeed. The higher their costly efforts to communicate, the more likely communication will succeed. If communication fails, R does not learn anything about the project quality: he still believes that by accepting it, he will earn r_H with probability α and lose |r_L| otherwise. If communication succeeds, there are two possible outcomes: R either finds out with certainty that the project is of high quality or that it is of low quality. After communication, R decides whether to accept or to refuse the project. The first essay of the thesis extends the framework of the modes of communication model (Dewatripont and Tirole, 2005) by considering the case of social preferences/S’s project quality incentives, as well as the one of a sender who is uncertain about the value of a parameter affecting R’s payoff. This essay shows theoretically that R’s communication objective and effort depend on whether the project yields R a negative expected payoff before communication (NEG case) or a positive one (POS case). In the NEG case, without any communication, R would refuse the project. R’s communication goal is to identify and accept a high quality project. R is only interested in finding out that the project is of high quality because it is the only communication outcome that induces him to change his mind about his project acceptance decision. Therefore, an increase in r_H and/or in α raises the agents’ efforts. Moreover, since R never accepts a low quality project, an increase in |r_L| (his loss from accepting a low quality project) does not affect the agents’ efforts. In the POS case, R’s communication goal is to identify and reject a low quality project. Therefore, the higher |r_L| and/or (1-α) (the probability before communication that the project is of low quality), the higher the agents’ efforts. Moreover, since R never rejects a high quality project, an increase in r_H does not affect the agents’ efforts. In the existing literature, S does not communicate if R’s goal is to identify and reject a low quality project (in the POS case) because it is common knowledge for both agents that R is ready to accept the project without any communication. I show that this result is not robust to very plausible extensions of the model. First, S may communicate if his revenue is tied to the project quality or if he has social preferences. The reason is that if S cares positively about R’s revenue, S might be ready to communicate to prevent R to some extent from accepting a low quality project. Another reason why S may communicate in the POS case is that he is uncertain whether R is in the NEG or POS case. Putting it differently, S does not know whether R would accept the project without communication. This implies that in the POS case, S’s project quality incentives and S’s uncertainty may both enable R to reduce his risk of accepting a low quality project through communication. In the second essay, a laboratory experiment tests some predictions of the first essay by investigating the impact of r_H and r_L on real communication effort choices. In the experiment, the projects are represented by master theses. A thesis is a high quality project if its grade is higher than 16.5 out of 20, and it is a low quality project if its grade is lower than 13 out of 20. The experiment round is composed of two stages. In the first stage, S has to read the master thesis and to write a report to transmit information about the thesis quality. In the second stage, R has to evaluate the thesis quality by reading S’s report and by comparing it to the master thesis. By measuring the participants’ communication efforts by the time they have spent on their tasks, the experiment suggests that R pursues one out of two communication objectives. In the NEG case, R’s objective is to find out whether he would make money by accepting the project: his effort depends positively on r_H and does not depend on r_L. In the POS case, R’s goal is to know whether he would lose money by accepting the project: his effort depends negatively on r_L and does not depend on r_H. In the third essay, a field experiment studies some predictions of the first essay, namely the impact of α, in the context of an information campaign about energy-saving projects. The information sent was controlled by the experimenter and each participant was a receiver. Moreover, the participants’ ex-ante and ex-post beliefs about the project quality (the likelihood of facing a high quality project) were assessed through a questionnaire both before and after the information campaign. The field experiment suggests that R’s effort depends on his ex-ante belief about the project quality. In the NEG case, R’s communication objective to enhance his chance of accepting a high quality project: his effort increases with α, the ex-ante probability of a high quality project. In the POS case, R’s objective is to enhance his chance of refusing a low quality project: his effort increases with the ex-ante probability of a low quality project, 1-α. The experiment results also suggest that new information has lower influence on posterior beliefs about the project quality if R ex ante holds strong views about it than if he holds a less clear-cut view. This essay therefore shows that discriminating the quantity of information sent according to α, including whether R is in the NEG or the POS case, may enable to reap efficiency gains on public information campaigns., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Innovation incentives are imperfectly provided in market settings: When deciding on their innovation activity, firms tend to focus on the maximization of their private benefits, poorly internalizing social benefits. This thesis analyzes how policy intervention could be designed in order to align private and social incentives. In the three papers of this thesis, I will consider three environments where firms' choices in a laissez-faire situation may be socially inefficient. The inefficiencies arise because of learning externalities, free riding when the innovation decision is made by a group of participants, or because firms are not willing to invest in a new activity that has a higher social than private value.In the first thesis paper, I deal with the strategies of firms in innovative consumer product markets characterized by demand uncertainty. I analyze the timing and location decision of firms in that context.In the second thesis paper, I consider the investment incentives of financial market infrastructures (FMIs). FMIs comprise the set of institutions that allow financial market participants to engage with each other. I assess the innovation incentives for different forms of ownership (user-owned versus third-party owned) and identify infrastructure service provision equilibria. In the third thesis paper, I address the question of how a government should allocate a subsidy budget over time in order to maximize the innovation activity in an industry., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

In this thesis, I apply the sophisticated tools made available by the econometrics of panel data and treatment models to a range of different issues. In the first Chapter, an ECM model is used to test on the existence of financing constraints in firms’ investment and R&D, taken a proxy for the efficiency of market institutions and governance rules in different countries. In the second chapter we test an agency model linking pay-performance contracts of CEOS to the financial situation of a firm by using a UK panel data. In the third chapter I use a sophisticated treatment model to evaluate the effectiveness of Italian public subsidies to R&D. Finally, in the fourth chapter I try to evaluate the efficiency of Italian regional systems of public healthcare by controlling for socio-economic factors and quality of healthcare in a composite model using panel data estimation and efficient frontier techniques.The first Chapter analyzes the investment behavior of a sample of R&D intensive firms which are quoted on the stock market from USA, UK and Japan for the period 1990-1998. By using an error correction model we test the elasticity of investment and R&D to cash flow in these countries to see by which measure different market institutions and corporate governance rules affects the cost of external financing. Contrary to previous studies, we find significant differences in the sensitivity to cash flow of the two types of investment, with R&D expenditure being much less sensitive than ordinary investment. This is not surprising given the more long-term nature of R&D expenditures. For what concerns the comparison between the different systems/countries, the USA stock markets confirms as the most efficient market providing outside financing at a much lower cost compared to other markets, especially for young, smaller firms.The second Chapter is a joint work with Biagio Speciale. It uses the data on a panel of quoted UK firms over the period 1995–2002 to study the effects of financial leverage on managerial compensation. The change in the investors’ expectations that caused the recent collapse of the stock market tech bubble is a perfect example of natural experiment that has been used as a source of plausibly exogenous variation in the firm’s debt. The estimates show that pay-for-performance sensitivity is increasing in financial leverage, with the exception of the 10% most levered firms, giving rise at the end to a non-linear (inverted U-shape) relationship between the two variables. The chapter includes also a theoretical model accounting for this relationship where an higher leverage increases both the expected returns and the expected variance of investment returns: the first effect (determining increased pay-performance sensitivity) prevails for low leverage values and the second effect (determining decreased pay-performance sensitivity) prevails for high leverage values.The third Chapter undertakes an empirical estimation of the additionality of public funding on both the propensity to initiate R&D activity and the intensity of R&D spending of Italian enterprises for the period 1998-2000, using data from the Third Community Innovation Survey and from firms' financial accounts. The chosen methodology (Endogenous Switching Type II-Tobit) takes into account the possibility that decisions about both starting an R&D activity (sample selection effect) and applying for/obtaining public funding (essential heterogeneity) are influenced by private knowledge of enterprises' idiosyncratic propensities in R&D spending. The present analysis shows that both these effects are indeed important and that they contribute to explain most of the additionality found with less sophisticated models.The fourth Chapter investigates the underlying causes of variability of public health expenditure per capita (SSPC henceforth) between Italian regions. A fixed-effect panel data estimate on the SSPC (for the period 1997-2006) is used in the first part of the paper to account for regional differences in terms of physical, demographic, socio-economic characteristics and in terms of other variables that affect demand and supply of health services. In the second part, we take the ‘adjusted’ SSPC and proceed to estimate an "efficient production function" of the quality of health services through Data Envelopment Analysis. This procedure allows us to separate the share of expenditure used for the improvement of the quality from the one that can be traced only to an inefficient use of financial resources. A comparison of regional SSPC after factoring out the socio-economic factors and the quality of healthcare shows that big differences still remain and are even exacerbated, signalling big pockets of inefficiency and correspondingly a huge potential for cost savings. Finally, a preliminary analysis shows a positive correlation between the efficiency of regional public spending in healthcare and the level of social capital., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

In this thesis I apply the concepts of Behavioral Economics to the analysis of the individual health care behavior. In the first chapter I provide a theoretical explanation of the link between loss aversion and health anxiety leading to infrequent preventive testing. In the second chapter I analyze this link empirically based on the general population questionnaire study. In the third chapter I theoretically explore the effects of motivational crowding-in and crowding-out induced by external or self-rewards for the self-control involving tasks such as weight loss or smoking cessation.Understanding psychological factors behind the reluctance to use preventive testing is a significant step towards a more efficient health care policy. Some people visit doctors very rarely because of a fear to receive negative results of medical inspection, others prefer to resort to medical services in order to prevent any diseases. Recent research in the field of Behavioral Economics suggests that human's preferences may be significantly influenced by the choice of a reference point. In the first chapter I study the link between loss aversion and the frequently observed tendency to avoid useful but negative information (the ostrich effect) in the context of preventive health care choices. I consider a model with reference-dependent utility that allows to characterize how people choose their health care strategy, namely, the frequency of preventive checkups. In this model an individual lives for two periods and faces a trade-off. She makes a choice between delaying testing until the second period with the risk of a more costly treatment in the future, or learning a possibly unpleasant diagnosis today, that implies an emotional loss but prevents an illness from further development. The model shows that high loss aversion decreases the frequency of preventive testing due to the fear of a bad diagnosis. Moreover, I show that under certain conditions increasing risk of illness discourages testing.In the second chapter I provide empirical support for the model predictions. I use a questionnaire study of a representative sample of the Dutch population to measure variables such as loss aversion, testing frequency and subjective risk. I consider the undiagnosed non-symptomatic population and concentrate on medical tests for four illnesses that include hypertension, diabetes, chronic lung disease and cancer. To measure loss aversion I employ a sequence of lottery questions formulated in terms of gains and losses of life years with respect to the current subjective life expectancy. To relate this measure of loss aversion to the testing frequency I use a two-part modeling approach. This approach distinguishes between the likelihood of participation in testing and the frequency of tests for those who decided to participate. The main findings confirm that loss aversion, as measured by lottery choices in terms of life expectancy, is significantly and negatively associated with the decision to participate in preventive testing for hypertension, diabetes and lung disease. Higher loss aversion also leads to lower frequency of self-tests for cancer among women. The effect is more pronounced in magnitude for people with higher subjective risk of illness.In the third chapter I explore the phenomena of crowding-out and crowding-in of motivation to exercise self-control. Various health care choices, such as keeping a diet, reducing sugar consumption (e.g. in case of diabetes) or abstaining from smoking, require costly self-control efforts. I study the long-run and short-run influence of external and self-rewards offered to stimulate self-control. In particular, I develop a theoretical model based on the combination of the dual-self approach to the analysis of the time-inconsistency problem with the principal-agent framework. I show that the psychological property of disappointment aversion (represented as loss aversion with respect to the expected outcome) helps to explain the differences in the effects of rewards when a person does not perfectly know her self-control costs. The model is based on two main assumptions. First, a person learns her abstention costs only if she exerts effort. Second, observing high abstention costs brings disutility due to disappointment (loss) aversion. The model shows that in the absence of external reward an individual will exercise self-control only when her confidence in successful abstention is high enough. However, observing high abstention costs will discourage the individual from exerting effort in the second period, i.e. will lead to the crowding-out of motivation. On the contrary, choosing zero effort in period 1 does not reveal the self-control costs. Hence, this preserves the person's self-confidence helping her to abstain in the second period. Such crowding-in of motivation is observed for the intermediate level of self-confidence. I compare this situation to the case when an external reward is offered in the first period. The model shows that given a sufficiently low self-confidence external reward may lead to abstention in both periods. At the same time, without it a person would not abstain in any period. However, for an intermediate self-confidence, external reward may lead to the crowding-out of motivation. For the same level of self-confidence, the absence of such reward may cause crowding-in. Overall, the model generates testable predictions and helps to explain contradictory empirical findings on the motivational effects of different types of rewards., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

In the first chapter of this thesis, I use the smooth ambiguity model developed by Klibanoff, Marinacci, and Mukerji (2005) to define the concepts of ambiguity and uncertainty premia in a way analogous to what Pratt (1964) did in the risk theory literature. I show that these concepts may be useful to quantify the effect ambiguity has on the welfare of economic agents. I also define several other concepts such as the unambiguous probability equivalent or the ambiguous utility premium, provide local approximations of these different premia and show the link that exists between them when comparing different degrees of ambiguity aversion not only in the small, but also in the large. In the second chapter, I analyze the effect of ambiguity on self-insurance and self-protection, that are tools used to deal with the uncertainty of facing a monetary loss when market insurance is not available (in the self-insurance model, the decision maker has the opportunity to furnish an effort to reduce the size of the loss occurring in the bad state of the world, while in the self-protection – or prevention – model, the effort reduces the probability of being in the bad state). In a short note, in the context of a two-period model I first examine the links between risk-aversion, prudence and self-insurance/self-protection activities under risk. Contrary to the results obtained in the static one-period model, I show that the impacts of prudence and of risk-aversion go in the same direction and generate a higher level of prevention in the more usual situations. I also show that the results concerning self-insurance in a single period framework may be easily extended to a two-period context. I then consider two-period self-insurance and self-protection models in the presence of ambiguity and analyze the effect of ambiguity aversion. I show that in most common situations, ambiguity prudence is a sufficient condition to observe an increase in the level of effort. I propose an interpretation of the model in the context of climate change, so that self-insurance and self-protection are respectively seen as adaptation and mitigation efforts a policy-maker should provide to deal with an uncertain catastrophic event, and interpret the results obtained as an expression of the Precautionary Principle. In the third chapter, I introduce the economic theory developed to deal with ambiguity in the context of medical decision-making. I show that, under diagnostic uncertainty, an increase in ambiguity aversion always leads a physician whose goal is to act in the best interest of his patient, to choose a higher level of treatment. In the context of a dichotomic choice (treatment versus no treatment), this result implies that taking into account the attitude agents generally manifest towards ambiguity may induce a physician to change his decision by opting for treatment more often. I further show that under therapeutic uncertainty, the opposite happens, i.e. an ambiguity averse physician may eventually choose not to treat a patient who would have been treated under ambiguity neutrality., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The dissertation suggests that geographical, institutional, religious and cultural links may be determinants of growth. We address a number of issues in this thesis. The starting point is naturally a study on growth, while the main focus is on the analysis of inequalities between countries with respect to their environment, and also on inequalities within countries.The very first step of the study, presented in Chapter one, is to build such non-physical relations between countries. In this chapter, we present both the choices and methods used to model the institutional and cultural weights matrices. Chapter 1 also presents a comparative study between the different matrices built. The final aim of this chapter is to identify the differences between the geographical, institutional and cultural environment.The following chapter incorporates these innovative new types of matrices in a study on growth. An externality growth model is therefore developed that takes proximities between entities into account, whether geographical, institutional or cultural. The purpose of the chapter is threefold. First, it compares the results obtained from spatial econometrics methods with classical regression, where observations of growth are considered as independent. Second, it examines whether the development of an externality model improves the quality of the estimation. Third, it investigates whether the institutional and cultural types of proximity make sense compared to the geographical one.Chapter 3 narrows the analysis of countries’ dependency with regard to their neighborhood, whether geographical, institutional or religious, and a quintile regression approach allows us to check whether the countries' wealth level matters. Do the poorest countries react in the same way as richer ones regarding the wealth of their geographical, institutional and religious neighbors? The gross impact of neighboring wealth on a country’s wealth is then estimated, and some relative effects of the three matrices combined are also shown, as well as the robustness of the estimates.Finally, Chapter 4 analyzes the dependence of poverty regarding neighborhood. The relative wealth and poverty of the neighborhood are examined as factors that can influence a country’s poverty level. The poverty index used is the proportion of people living on less than one or two dollars a day. The study only considers the developing countries as data for the developed countries on the proportion of this variable is near zero. Once again, the final aim is to check whether a country’s poverty is exacerbated by its geographical, institutional and religious neighborhood poverty or if it takes advantage of neighborhood wealth to manage its own poverty issues., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

In today’s globalised world, everyday life becomes increasingly “liquid” - changing and fragile - as individuals continuously adapt their lifestyle and behaviour to global influences (Bauman 2000). To provide a general framework for understanding this world, Appadurai (1996) introduces five “dimensions” of global flows in his seminal work Modernity At Large: ethnoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, ideoscapes, and technoscapes. One of them, the ethnoscapes, refers to the increased mobility of individuals and peoples, impacting their cultural affiliations and social networks. The focus of this thesis lies on international, cross-border migrants, the primary representatives of these uprooted individuals. Studying migrants’ consumption behaviour provides a better understanding of the issues faced by all members of liquid life in terms of consumption behaviour, whether they are migrants or not, by referring to its most extreme cases.The present dissertation addresses migrant consumer research through an original angle. It suggests that international migrants position themselves in the global mediascapes of cosmopolitanism and transmigrant communities by activating different consumption discourses. This approach offers a solution to previous ambiguous categorisations of international migrants by relying on self-categorisation across national and cultural boundaries instead of outside-defined sociodemographic or geopolitical criteria. In addition to providing a typology based on the migrants’ strategies of positioning that explains global consumer acculturation, the results allow for a disambiguation of the notions of immigrants, globals and cosmopolitans.The contribution of the dissertation lies in its contrast to existing research, and is therefore more adapted to the liquidity of our modern world. Indeed, the field of consumer research as much as political discourse or companies tend to categorise international migrants according to socioeconomic or geopolitical criteria, such as education, duration of stay or ethnic origin. While consumer research often views low-skilled immigrants in light of specific ethnic groups (Peñaloza 1994, Oswald 1999, Üçok 2007), cross-cultural samples represent the preferred approach to highly-skilled expatriates (Thompson and Tambyah 1999). Consumer research addresses and considers these categories of migrants differently, a questionable postulation in light of global flows which render movement across nations more complex and lead to mixed and multiple cultural affiliations. The main research question to answer in the present thesis is: How do international migrants use consumption behaviour to make sense of their experience? Its broad character allows for new insights and approaches to emerge, both on the side of existing literature and on the empirical side. The dissertation initiates the answer by a first review of the literature. The review highlights gaps and contradictions which can be found in the literature centred on international migrants and their consumption behaviour. The explanation of the context of this research encompasses the definition of consumer culture as well as of globalisation. Indeed, consumption as a discourse plays a role especially in terms of the subscription to a particular group; individuals use consumption to communicate, to express their affiliation with a family, or a place, to situate their identity in their universe (Douglas and Isherwood 1979). These issues change in the global context, and therefore need review. Migration research constitutes the second chapter of the literature review. It presents on the one hand the people endeavouring migration, and on the other, illustrates the various models explaining migration as a process. Based on this review, the research question transforms, splitting it into three elements, each focusing on one element: cultural affiliations, migrant networks and consumer acculturation. The consequent empirical part aims at answering these three questions through three separate, though complementary, research phases, which rely on in-depth interviews, focus groups and observations. Each phase predominantly addressed one research question, though all three elements remain present in all phases. Different types of consumption discourses emerge; in the case of a focus on products of home and/or host culture, three locality discourses develop. Seven globality discourses integrate global and other foreign products in the equation. International migrants seem to use these locality and globality discourses to position themselves in today’s liquid world. They can consequently be compared to the twelve worlds that are presented by Rosenau (2004) as positioning strategies resulting from global “fragmegration”, that is, the difficulty of integrating fragmented and contradictory elements of global societies. The contribution of this dissertation lies in the integration of more diversity in the concepts of cultural affiliations, migrant networks and consumer acculturation. Consequently, the locality and globality discourses provide indications as to the acculturation strategies possible for its members.Doing so, this thesis integrates debates of the local and the global, immigrants versus expatriates, integration versus acculturation, a comparison of interest to both researchers and marketers. On a theoretical level, the thesis provides thus a more generalised view on international migrants, incorporating previous categories. It provides practical solutions, both on a political and on a managerial level. The provided typology enables policy-makers and managers to better understand the new tendencies and problematics inherent to international migration and to address migrants in a way taking into account their actual affiliations and networks., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This thesis aims at determining the theoretical and empirical consequences of the consideration of socially responsible indicators in the traditional portfolio selection. The first chapter studies the significance of the mean-variance efficiency loss of a sovereign bond portfolio when introducing a constraint on the average socially responsible ratings of the governments. By using a sample of developed sovereign bonds on the period 1995-2008, we show that it is possible to increase sensibly the average socially responsible rating without significantly losing in terms of diversification. The second chapter proposes a theoretical analysis of the impact on the efficient frontier of a constraint on the socially responsible ratings of the portfolio. We highlight that different cases may arise depending on the correlation between the expected returns and the socially responsible ratings and on the investor’s risk aversion. Lastly, as the issue of the efficiency of socially responsible portfolios is a central point in the financial literature, the last chapter proposes a new mean-variance efficiency test in the realistic case where there is no available risk-free asset., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Cette thèse contient trois études sur le fonctionnement des banques.Le premier Chapitre analyse empiriquement comment la capacité d’offrir des emprunts à long terme est influencée par la dimension des intermédiaires financiers.Le deuxième Chapitre analyse, avec un model théorique caractérisé par la présence de soft-budget constraint, ratchet effect et short-termism, comment la pression compétitive influence la capacité des banque de financer le firmes ayant des projets de bonne qualité.Le troisième Chapitre examine, avec un model théorique du type moral hazard common agency, le conflits d'intérêts des banques universelles.Financial intermediaries are recognized to promote the efficiency of resource allocation by mitigating problems of incentives, asymmetric information and contract incompleteness. The role played by financial intermediaries is considered so crucial that these institutions have received all over the world the greatest attention of regulators.Across and within banking sectors it is possible to observe a wide variety of intermediaries. Banks may differ in their size, market power and degree of specialization. This variety raises interesting questions about the features of a well functioning banking sector. These questions have inspired an important body of economic literature which, however, is still inconclusive in many aspects. This dissertation includes three studies intending to contribute in this direction.Chapter 1 will empirically study the willingness of smaller and larger lenders to grant long-term loans which, as credit to SME's, constitute an opaque segment of the credit market. Chapter 2 analyzes, with a theoretical model, the effects of competition on the efficiency of the banking sector when this is characterized by dynamic commitment issues which brings to excessive refinancing of bad quality investments (so called soft-budget constraint) or excessive termination of good ones (ratchet effect and short-termism). Chapter 3 presents a model to investigate to what extent the distortions posed by conflicts of interest in universal banks can be addressed through the provision of appropriate incentive schemes by the different categories of clients., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Can we fruitfully use the same macroeconomic model to forecast and to perform policy analysis? There is a tension between a model’s ability to forecast accurately and its ability to tell a theoretically consistent story. The aim of this dissertation is to propose ways to soothe this tension, combining structural and reduced-form models in order to have models that can effectively do both., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished