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Echenique et. al. (2013) established the testable revealed preference restrictions for stable aggregate matching with transferable (TU) and non-transferable utility (NTU) and for extremal stable matchings. In this paper, we rephrase their restrictions in terms of properties on a corresponding bipartite graph. From this, we obtain a simple condition that verifies whether a given aggregate matching is rationalisable. For matchings that are not rationalisable, we provide a simple greedy algorithm that computes the minimum number of matches that needs to be removed to obtain a rationalisable matching. We also show that the related problem of finding the minimum number of types that we need to remove in order to obtain a rationalisable matching is NP-complete., We introduce a notion of fairness, inspired by the equality of opportunity literature, into the centralized school choice setting, endowed with a measure of the quality of matches between students and schools. In this framework, fairness considerations are made by a social evaluator based on the match quality distribution. We impose the standard notion of stability as minimal desideratum and study matchings that satisfy our notion of fairness, and an efficiency requirement based on aggregate match quality. To overcome some of the identified incompatibilities, we propose two alternative approaches. The first one is a linear programming solution to maximize fairness under stability constraints. The second approach weakens fairness and efficiency to define a class of opportunity egalitarian social welfare functions that evaluate stable matchings. We then describe an algorithm to find the stable matching that maximizes social welfare. We conclude with an illustration on the allocation of Italian high school students in 2021/2022., This paper studies the object allocation problem, which involves assigning objects to agents while taking into account both object capacities and agents’ preferences. I focus on two classes of allocations: the Pareto efficient and Individual rational allocations and the Pareto efficient and Weak-core stable allocations. The goal is to look at two optimality criteria within these classes: one that maximizes the number of individuals improving upon their initial endowment (MAXDIST), and the one that minimizes the number of individuals who need to change from their initial allocation to the final one (MINDIST). I present an efficient algorithm for addressing the MAXDIST problem for the first class of allocations (Pareto efficient and Individual rational). Next, I study a special case of this problem where priority is given to the most disadvantaged individuals. I establish NP-completeness results for the other problems. I also look at how the results change when restricting individual preferences to be dichotomous. Finally, I present an integer programming formulation to solve small to moderately-sized instances of the NP-hard problems., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This thesis studies, develops, and tests theories of decision-making under uncertainty. I focus my analysis on two different situations. The first concerns situations where the decision-maker might be incapable of assigning precise probabilities to some outcomes, because she lacks information to do so. In such settings, the decision-maker is said to face ambiguity. This distinction is essential as many people exhibit ambiguity aversion and prefer choice situations with known probabilities (risk) over choice situations where probabilities are not known (ambiguity). The models that try to capture those behaviours, will be the focus of Chapter 1. The second type of problem this thesis studies concerns situations where the decision-maker has to make an investment decision after experiencing an event whose outcome is below what she expected. I specifically focus on how negative emotions stemming from such events influence people's subsequent decisions. These dynamics will be the focus of chapters 2 and 3., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The thesis is composed of four chapters.Chapter 1 axiomatically studies how to measure well-being when individuals have heterogeneous preferences and consumption bundles are evaluated by comparison with some reference bundle (a poverty line bundle, an index of needs, the average consumption in a reference group, etc.). The key requirement is that well-being remains constant if the reference bundle changes towards a bundle that the individual deems equivalent. Accounting for preferences may lead two individuals with identical consumption and reference bundles to have unequal well-being levels. To limit this inequality, four axioms based on the lattice structure of the set of indifference contours are studied. Three well-being measures are defined and characterized. One prominent measure corresponds to the ratio between equivalent income at consumption and at reference, with prices being chosen to maximize well-being.Chapter 2 proposes a framework to assess fairness in multidimensional distributions while respecting individual preferences. It introduces a simple measure - Equivalent Advantage - that captures the distance from the current outcome to the potentially individual specific norm outcome. A nonparametric approach is proposed to partially identify Equivalent Advantage via set identification of individual indifference curves. The methodology is illustrated by analysing multidimensional fairness in Belgium using the MEqIn database. Despite the set identification, the analysis of the Equivalent Advantage distribution allows for interesting insights on multidimensional inequality, poverty and opportunity distribution. Chapter 3 investigates the possibility of integrating a notion of fairness, inspired by theequality of opportunity literature, into the centralized school choice setting. By doing so, it widens the list of available tools to realize equality of opportunityin education. This chapter enriches the standard school choice setting with the notion of educat, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This thesis analyses the socioeconomic repercussions of armed conflicts and natural disasters. Calculating the consequences of global public bads helps uncover the scale, distribution, and structure of their socioeconomic burden. State-of-the art causal inference methodologies are used to ensure the validity of the results. Both short- and long-term effects are explored, by considering various generations and indicators. The first chapter sets out to measure the global cost of all the major armed conflicts that took place in the world between 1970 and 2014. A counterfactual analysis shows that had there been no such conflicts throughout those decades, global GDP would have been 12% higher in 2014. The largest absolute losses associated with violence emanate from Asia, while many highincome economies are found to benefit economically from participating in conflicts on foreign soil. The second chapter compares the effects of the two main types of natural disasters that exist: geological and climatic disasters. Given its wide geographical variety, Mexico is used for this study, and educational attainment amongst 17 and 18-year-olds is used to capture the potential long-term effects of these shocks. Climatic disasters are found to have the worst effect, and the difference between the two is most pronounced in highly urbanized municipalities. Finally, the third chapter analyses the spillovers of public violence on intimate partner violence (IPV). Focusing on Mexico, the study finds that municipalities that saw an upsurge in conflict-related homicides since 2007 also experienced an average rise of 8 to 12% in the share of surveyed women who declared having experienced IPV. This result is mostly found amongst women with fewer options outside marriage, as measured by lower income, educational attainment, and decision-making power within their household. The thesis thus shows how younger generations, women, and economies as a whole can be affected by conflicts and disasters., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Albanesi (2016) defines social insurance schemes as government transfer programs whereby individuals who claim a condition or state that reduces their labor income obtain a transfer from the government. Which "conditions'' and "states'' should be covered by social insurance, as well as the optimal level of coverage, has been the source of debates among policy-makers and economists for more than a century.Early on, working women fought for protection against income loss resulting from childbirth. Back in October 1919, delegates of the first International Congress of Working Women gathered in Washington D.C. and successfully convinced the International Labour Organization to adopt a maternity protection convention, which mandated that maternity leave must come with benefits "sufficient for the full and healthy maintenance'' of mother and child. Several decades later, in the 1970's, Scandinavian countries adopted gender-neutral parental leave policies, which opened government paid leaves to fathers. They have since been followed by more than 90 countries which offer paid leave mandates to both parents. Probably the largest outlier among non-adopters of parental leave policies is the United States, whose 46th president Joe Biden failed during the first year of his mandate to fulfill his campaign promise to put in place a nation-wide parental leave program. The century-long reforms across the world, as well as the ongoing debate in the USA, one of the largest labor markets, motivates a deeper understanding of the consequences of parental leave policies for work and family decisions.The first two chapters of this thesis find their origin in previous work, which studies the labor market trajectory of Belgian women around childbirth. This earlier study demonstrates that Belgian mothers lose about 30 percent of their labor earnings relative to fathers, up to eight years after the birth of their first child (Fontenay et al. 2021). Figure I at the end of the introduction illus, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Increasing the employment rate of the working age population has been at the top of policy and research agendas alike. In this thesis, I study the impacts of three flagship Active Labour Market programs – a job search monitoring program, a wage subsidy, and a training program – targeted at vulnerable populations. In the first chapter, I study the effects of a job search monitoring policy targeted at the long-term unemployed, focusing not only on transitions from unemployment to employment, but also on participation in other social welfare programs. Using a Regression Discontinuity Design, I show that the program decreased the probability of remaining unemployed, but only through an increase in the probability of receiving Disability Insurance benefits. Employment and participation in other types of social welfare programs are, on the other hand, unaffected. These findings highlight that, for individuals who are on the fringes of the labour market, job search monitoring might not be sufficient to foster a return to employment. In the second chapter, I use a Difference-in-Differences approach to study the effects of implementing domestic service subsidies on employment and work disability in the targeted sectors. I then complement this analysis with an event study Difference-in-Differences approach that allows to uncover how working in these subsidized jobs affects the labour market outcomes of subsidized workers. I show that domestic service subsidies can be an effective means of creating employment opportunities for low-skilled workers in the sector of domestic services, by both reducing unemployment and increasing labour market participation of the target group. I also show that PHS subsidies can entail important unintended costs for the Disability Insurance and possibly deteriorate the health of subsidized workers. In the last chapter, I explore whether jobseekers can be encouraged to follow trainings for shortage occupations through a low-cost information interve, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This PhD thesis focuses on the socioeconomic determinants of health outcomes and drug consumption, the evaluation of policy levers aimed at limiting inappropriate pharmaceuticals’ use, as well as the role played by pharmaceutical advertising in the healthcare sector. The thesis is broadly divided into two parts. The first part investigates how socioeconomic disparities are empirically related to the spread of an infectious disease, the COVID-19 pandemic (Chapter 1), as well as consumption of potentially addictive medicines, as given by opioid pain-relievers (Chapter 2). The second part analyses the impact of laws restricting access to narcotic medications. The focus here is on Codeine-containing products, classified as mild opioids. I show how the impact of this type of policies varies depending on the socioeconomic environment in which they are applied in Chapter 3. Chapter 4, instead, studies how pharmaceutical companies reallocate their advertising expenses across geographical areas following the implementation of such policies and how this, in turn, affects sales. This research is primarily empirical and policy-oriented, even though one of my projects includes a theoretical component. The empirical analyses rely on the use of French data collected from several sources., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Chapter 1 analyses the optimal policy-mix within a New Keynesian model extended with borrowing households subject to costly access to financial market. It shows that in absence coincidence between stabilization of the output gap and consumption inequalities, fiscal policy becomes a relevant part of the optimal policy mix. Chapter 2 studies the inflation differentials between Malta and the Euro Area using a DSGE model. It finds that most of the differentials results from cyclical factors, with foreign shocks being responsible for the bulk of the variations. Chapter 3 looks at the importance of the various transmission channels of the ECB monetary policy' spillover toward North European countries. Using the responses of individual countries variables provided by a factor model featuring regional factors, it provides evidence that spillovers transmit through real channel rather than financial ones., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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This PhD dissertation aims at broadening the knowledge on household economics and their behavior. More precisely, it focuses on the well-being of household’s members, and its determinants, with, among others, an emphasis on the individuals’ time allocations. This analysis is performed in several steps as different ways of measuring well-being and of considering households are allowed for. Concerning households, it goes from considering them as a single entity to modeling them as a collection of individuals trying to take into account the potential interdependencies between these individuals. As for the measure of well-being, it starts by simply looking at the consumption of the households, then at the self-declared well-being of their members (what is called subjective well-being in the literature), to finally indirectly consider the well-being of the children in the households. The first chapter of this thesis therefore investigates on the effect of households’ indebtedness on their consumption. The second chapter, analyses the relationship between time allocations of household’s members and their subjective well-being (SWB). Finally, the third chapter tries to look at the impact that parents’ and grandparents’ level of education has on the investments that the children in the households receive, both in terms of time and money., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This Ph.D. thesis focuses on the social and distributional effects of public policies, whether these are intended or not. To address the topic, I categorize public policies along two dimensions. First, I distinguish between policies with explicit social objectives and those without. Second, I distinguish between policies targeting specific vulnerable groups and those covering the whole population. The thesis consists of three empirical evaluations in three different contexts and sectors. The first chapter analyzes the introduction of a public policy with explicit social objectives and an explicit targeting of the most vulnerable. I focus on the impact of a social subsidy on electricity prices on the likelihood of energy poverty of vulnerable households in Spain. The second chapter assesses a public policy with social objectives but not directly targeted to the most vulnerable population. I investigate the heterogeneous health impact of the introduction in Ghana of free health insurance for all children. Finally, the third chapter analyzes the case of a policy without explicit social objectives or targeting. In this case I evaluate the unintended distributional effects of the introduction of a railroad in Kazakhstan through its effects on trade by the local population., Chapter 1: How effective has the electricity social rate been in reducing energy poverty in Spain? This chapter analyzes whether the introduction of an electricity social rate was effective in reducing the likelihood of energy poverty. We focus on the Bono Social de Electricidad, introduced in 2009 in Spain's electricity market, a policy aimed at increasing the affordability of electricity by entailing a discount on prices for vulnerable consumers. Using data from the family budget surveys from 2006 to 2017, we rely on a difference-in-differences approach to measure its causal impact on energy poverty. We show that, on average, the introduction of the policy has reduced the likelihood of energy poverty. However, the magnitude of the effect is quite modest in practice as it takes only 59,000 households out of energy poverty out of the 2.8 million households still in that situation in 2018. It is noteworthy that the results also show that the lower effective prices do not lead an increase of the beneficiaries consumption of electricity. Overall this chapter provides new evidence on the institutional determinants of energy poverty and highlights the importance of assessing the magnitude of the effects as well as the targeting strategy of public policies to make the most of the resources allocated to social policies., Chapter 2: Does health insurance improve health for all? Heterogeneous effects on children in Ghana. This chapter investigates the extent to which the impact of a policy depends on the characteristics of the beneficiaries but also on the institutional capacity of the decentralized implementing agencies. To do so, I analyze the case of Ghana’s National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) that provides free coverage for all children. I exploit the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey of 2011 and I use propensity score matching to account for selection in the scheme. The study finds that, even though the NHIS is successful on average in improving health outcomes among insured children in Ghana, gains are not shared equally across regions. The positive impact of health insurance is entirely concentrated among the lower-income households in regions with a high quality of public health care. This chapter sheds a new light on the mixed results of the literature on the impact of health insurance on health outcomes. It provides an understanding of the sources of the heterogeneous impact of a National Health Insurance Scheme and highlights the importance of context and implementation as drivers of its effectiveness., Chapter 3: Distributional effects of colonial railroads: Evidence from Kazakhstan. This chapter analyzes how the gains from a major public investment in railways undertaken without any explicit social objectives are shared among the population. More specifically, we study the distributional effect of Orenburg-Tashkent railroad constructed by the Russian Empire through Kazakh steppes in 1905-1906. The analysis is based on a unique historical dataset allowing us to provide evidence from a quasi-natural experiment to compare economic outcomes of households of varying wealth located in districts close and far from the railroad. We focus on the impact of the investment on the trading activities of households.We find that wealthier households benefited disproportionately more in trading activities from railroad closeness, whereas the trading activity of the poorer strata located closer to the railroad decreased. The colonial railroad appears affecting the indigenous population mostly through bringing in Russian peasant settlements rather than by reducing costs of long-distance trade. This paper provides novel evidence of the distributional effects of transportation infrastructure within regions. It further stresses the short and medium term social risks associated with failures to consider explicitly all the welfare impact of major public investments rather than just focusing on their long term growth payoffs., Conclusion: The analysis of these three case studies documents the diversity of social and distributional concerns arising from public policies. By studying different contexts with different methodological approaches, this thesis points to the importance of: (1) assessing ex-ante the size of the effects to reduce the risk of misuse of resources; (2) matching the targeting of beneficiaries with the stated policy objectives; (3) matching implementation strategies with institutional capacity; (4) considering the likely heterogeneity of direct impacts and their causes; and (5) considering explicitly the possibility of unintended or indirect social and distributional effects of policies to adopt mitigating solutions as needed. Overall, such evidence is relevant for both the evaluation and monitoring of existing policies as well as for the implementation of new policy reforms., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Property rights are a central feature of well-functioning economic systems. By shaping incentives to participate in economic activities, property rights lead to investment, development and growth. However, the exercise of property rights over assets necessary to our daily lives may come at a social cost. Employing quasi-experimental designs, I show that the exclusion of individuals from secure access to land and housing leads to the forcible appropriation of these assets for subsistence purposes. First, the expansion of commercial farming induced by a market-oriented reform in the mid-90s in Brazil led to an increase in cases of contested land. Results suggest that the effect on land disputes is mainly driven by the reduction of land informally accessible to local communities. Second, in the same context, local organizations facilitated political mobilization and this latter advanced land redistribution by the government. Third, the adoption of a policy inducing evictions in Ohio's cities from 2000 to 2016 led to an increase in property crime over potentially inhabitable assets. Findings seems to be driven by evicted women losing employment, hence leading to a reduction in income. Overall, this dissertation shows that individuals excluded from access to land and housing are pushed to employ force to use these assets., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

When you think about hedge funds, you probably think of many terms such as short-selling, speculation, arbitrage, etc. All these terms have raised passionate debate since the early years of the hedge fund industry. These debates have mainly focused on the added value of hedge funds as a new alternative asset class, the analysis of their performance, and the role played by hedge funds in the global financial system. The conclusions drawn from these discussions are so mixed that it is difficult today, if not even impossible, to provide a clear definition of what constitute a hedge fund and what role they play in the global financial system. This dissertation attempts to contribute to those discussions by investigating the factors behind hedge fund performance and resilience. The dissertation is intended to be innovative thanks to the novel statistical methods and the sophisticated data that we used to conduct our analyses.The first research project contributes to the existing debate on the assessment of hedge fund performance as compared to the performance of traditional assets. By applying an innovative statistical approach – the Data Envelopment Analysis – we show that the answer to the question of whether hedge funds outperform or not traditional assets depends on the setting used to gauge this performance. More precisely, we have shown that under the mean-variance setting hedge funds appear to significantly outperform equities. However, this outperformance fades away when we take into account higher moments (i.e. the skewness and kurtosis) of the return distributions. The second research project examines hedge fund performance through the prism of managerial education. Our empirical analysis is based on hand-collected data on the academic background of hedge fund managers, which has allowed us to classify them into quants (managers with a quantitative academic background) and non-quants. By focusing on three hedge fund categories, we show that part of the cross-se, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This thesis is concerned with the relationship between the manager or executive as an individual, and the organization. The theoretical and empirical exploration covers phases of crisis, when organizations approach failure, and more normal times It comprises of two parts that respectively explore: a) strategic errors and failures and their management; and b) forms of leadership that emphasize the development not only of the organization, but also that of the employees, with a particular focus on servant leadership. In each part, a first chapter offers a theoretical development, followed by an empirical study. Contributions in the first part on strategic errors include: a) a novel theorization of organizational failure as an outcome of strategic errors within the overarching theoretical framework of institutional theory; and b) a qualitative study based on content analysis of in-depth of interviews of 30 CEOs and board chairs, including 21 from top European firms in the financial industry employing one million people, that develops error acknowledgment as a key element of the management of strategic errors. Contributions in the second part on leadership include: a) a theoretical re-articulation of six "positive" leadership theories in light of attribution theory, with leader self-awareness, ethics, and integrity coalescing the six theories; and b) a quantitative study showing a positive association from servant leadership to business-unit profit growth, mediated by employee flourishing., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This dissertation empirically studies the interplay of government policies, finance, and economic development. More specifically, it considers the impact of corporate taxes on employment, of bank regulation on financial information sharing on banking stability and of banking crises on democracy. Two of the chapters focus on Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. The third one takes a more global perspective. Chapter 1 evaluates the impact of corporate income tax rates (CIT) on employment at the firm level for a sample of SSA countries. It finds that on average, firms employ more workers in countries with higher CIT rates. This is consistent with the fact that corporate tax revenues allow governments to provide public goods and infrastructure which are crucial to firm activities. We report estimation results to support this assumption. More specifically, while the marginal effect of CIT decreases with income level or with government expenditures, it increases with the level of democracy. Furthermore, we also find that the effect of CIT rates on employment works partially through improvements in the business environment in which firms operate. Chapter 2 assesses the effects of government policies setting the extent to which credit information on the credit history of borrowers is shared among lenders. It shows that credit information sharing stabilizes banks. Moreover, despite foreign banks having an informational disadvantage over domestic banks due to information frictions and would hence benefit more from credit information sharing, the results indicate that both types of banks are affected in the same way. This suggests that foreign banks rely on alternative strategies to compensate for their informational disadvantage in local markets. Lastly, Chapter 3 documents the impact of banking crises on the level of democracy. It provides evidence that democracy improves in the 10-year window following the occurrence of a banking crisis. The results also highlight the prese, Cette thèse étudie empiriquement l'interaction des politiques gouvernementales, de la finance, et du développement économique. Plus précisément, il examine l'impact de la fiscalité des entreprises sur l'emploi, de la réglementation bancaire relative au partage d'informations sur le crédit sur la stabilité bancaire, et des crises bancaires sur la démocratie. Les deux premiers chapitres se focalisent sur les pays d'Afrique subsaharienne. Le troisième adopte une perspective plus globale pour couvrir. Le premier chapitre évalue l'impact des taux d'imposition des sociétés (IS) sur l'emploi au niveau de l'entreprise pour un échantillon de pays d'Afrique subsaharienne. Ses résultats montrent qu'en moyenne, les entreprises emploient plus de travailleurs dans les pays où les taux de taxation des entreprises sont plus élevés. Cela s’explique par le fait que les recettes de l'impôt sur les sociétés permettent aux gouvernements de financer des biens publics et des infrastructures qui sont essentiels aux activités des entreprises. Nous présentons des résultats d'estimation pour soutenir cette hypothèse. Plus précisément, alors que l'effet marginal de l'IS diminue avec le niveau de revenu ou avec les dépenses publiques, il augmente avec le niveau de démocratie. En outre, nous constatons également que l'effet des taux d'IS sur l'emploi s'explique en partie par l'amélioration de l'environnement des affaires dans lequel opèrent les entreprises. Le second chapitre évalue les effets des politiques gouvernementales fixant la mesure dans laquelle les informations sur les antécédents de crédit des emprunteurs sont partagées entre les prêteurs. Il montre que le partage d'informations sur le crédit permet de stabiliser les banques. De plus, bien que les banques étrangères aient un désavantage informationnel par rapport aux banques nationales en raison de frictions d'information et bénéficieraient donc davantage du partage d'informations sur le crédit, les résultats indiquent que les deux t, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Consciousness about the need for a more sustainable consumption and production patterns, as well as the will to cope with issues such as social exclusion and poverty, rose in the last decades. To answer such problems, new forms of social ventures have emerged on markets, including under the legal form of corporations. Social corporations are fully-fledged limited companies that officially commit themselves to a social mission by including the latter in their bylaws. Through their commercial activities, these new forms of social ventures target a specific social outcome. Either the whole population or a targeted group can benefit from this outcome. Thus, social corporations aim to pursue the common good. Entitled “Social Ventures and the Commons”, this doctoral dissertation aims to understand how new alternative profit-seeking business models, such as social corporations, can manage and contribute to the governance of common goods. With her seminal work, Elinor Ostrom widened the path for scholars to study the commons. Ever since, the academic world has extensively relied on her eight design principles when researching commons, allowing for a varied literature on the topic and the emergence of a paradigm in recent years; however, features of this paradigm are still fuzzy as different views and concepts of commons exist. While Ostrom conducted her research on the governance of traditional commons mainly, i.e. local natural resources collectively managed, the emergence of new concepts calls for a better of their governance mechanisms. Amongst the different concepts of commons existing, new commons have recently emerged. New commons are resources that have newly been recognized as commons. They derive from the principle of “commoning”: they are shared resources collectively organized and managed and can take the form of human-made commons, like culture, knowledge or urban spaces. They can be created both by humans and/or by organizations that are managed collectively. T, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, iiTSE, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The main idea of this thesis is to study three different issues, economic, political, or financial, related to three different public infrastructure sectors, transport, water and sewerage, and electricity, by using three different methodological approaches. In the first chapter, I make creative use of a non-parametric technique traditionally used to measure the relative efficiency of a set of similar firms, data envelopment analysis, to identify the most likely objective, economic vs. political, behind a specific policy. In the second chapter I empirically investigate the effects of the increasing private financial ownership of the water and sewerage utilities in England and Wales on key outcome variables such as leverage levels and consumer bills. Finally, in the third chapter, I evaluate an equity-aimed policy introduced in the electricity sector in Spain in 2009 by measuring the effect of its introduction on the probability of a household of being energy poor.Chapter One – Unbundling political and economic rationality: a non-parametric approach tested on transport infrastructure in SpainThis paper suggests a simple quantitative method to assess the extent to which public investment decisions are dominated by political or economic motivations. The true motivation can be identified by modeling each policy goal as the focus of the optimization anchoring a data envelopment analysis of the efficiency of the observed implementation. In other words, we rank performance based on how far observed behavior is under each possible goal, and the goal for which the distance is smaller reveals the specific motivation of the investment or any policy decision for that matter. Traditionally, data envelopment analysis is used to measure the relative efficiency of a set of firms having a similar productive structure. In this case, each firm corresponds to a different policy year, the policy being the determinant of the investment made.The approach is tested on Spain’s land transport, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This thesis explores some different dimensions of business cycle analysis and monetary policy,in closed and open economies. In the first chapter, I develop a model to analyze the roleof research and development in the US business cycle, and its ability to produce macroeconomicfluctuations by generating expectations of future productivity gains. In the secondchapter, I empirically investigate how changes in central bank transparency affects financialmarkets response to central bank announcements in the United Kingdom. Finally, in thethird chapter, I analyze some heterogeneities in the international spillovers of central bankannouncements, focusing on the behavior of exchange rates and international capital flows.The first chapter studies the role of R&D-based innovation within the US business cycle. Thechapter builds on the idea that temporary business cycle frequency contractions can result inprolonged medium-run slowdowns, if an economy’s technological growth is generated by asector of profit-maximizing innovators. In order to analyse the business cycle spillovers oninnovation activity, this chapter analyzes the contribution of R&D-based innovation to USbusiness cycle dynamics combining techniques from the empirical and theoretical literature.First, using a Bayesian VAR identified with a Cholesky recursive formulation, the papershows that innovation shocks are generally inflationary and generate rises in hours worked.Second, the paper introduces a medium-scale New-Keynesian model of creative destructionthat can rationalize these facts. In the model, a sector of profit-maximizing innovators investsin R&D and endogenously generates productivity gains, ultimately determining theeconomy’s growth rate. The estimated responses to innovation shocks are characterized bypowerful wealth effects that offset the contractionary spillovers on the labour market conventionally associated with productivity increases. The estimation results suggest that thebulk of the productivity s, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The thesis contains four essays, covering topics in the field of real-time macroeconometrics, forecasting and applied macroeconomics. In the first two chapters, I use recent techniques developed in the "nowcasting" literature in order to analyse and interpret the macroeconomic news flow. I use them either to assess current macroeconomic conditions, showing the importance of foreign indicators dealing with small open economies, or linking macroeconomic news to asset prices, through a model that help us interpret macroeconomic data and explaining the linkages between macro variables and financial indicators. In the third chapter, I analyse the link between macroeconomic data in real-time and the yield curve of interest rates, constructing a forecasting model which takes into account the peculiar characteristics of the macroeconomic data flow. In the last chapter, I present a Bayesian Vector Autoregression model built in order to analyse the last two crisis in the Eurozone (2008-09, and 2011-12) identifying their unique characteristics with respect to historical regularities, an issue of great importance from a policy perspective., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

In this thesis I apply modern econometric techniques on macroeconomic time series. Forecasting is here developed along several dimensions in the three chapters. The chapters are in principle self-contained. However, a common element is represented by the business cycle analysis. In the first paper, which primarily deals with the problem of forecasting euro area inflation in the short and medium run, we also compute the country-specific responses of a common business cycle shock. Both chapters 2 and 3 deal predominately with business cycle issues from two different perspectives. The former chapter analyses the business cycle as a dichotomous non-observable variable and addresses the issue of evaluating the euro area business cycle dating formulated by the CEPR committee, while the latter chapter studies the entire distribution of GDP growth., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This manuscript is composed of three chapters.In the first chapter, I analyze the impact of key European Central Bank’s unconventional monetary policy announcements on inflation expectations, measured by Euro Area five-year Inflation Linked Swap rates five years ahead, since the aftermath of the crisis. I control for market liquidity and uncertainty measures, change in oil price shock and macroeconomic news. The results show that the impact of the European Central Bank’s announcements has been positive during the period under observation. Along the line of the expansionary monetary policy measures implemented, the agents have been revising upwards their long term inflation expectations. This means that the unconventional monetary policy measures were effective. In the second chapter, co-authored with Claudia Pacella, we construct a Bayesian vector autoregressive model with three layers of information: the key drivers of inflation, cross-country dynamic interactions, and country-specific variables. The model provides good forecasting accuracy with respect to the popular benchmarks used in the literature. We perform a step-by-step analysis to shed light on which layer of information is more crucial for accurately forecasting euro area inflation. Our empirical analysis reveals the importance of including the key drivers of inflation and taking into account the multi-country dimension of the euro area. The results show that the complete model performs better overall in forecasting inflation excluding energy and unprocessed food over the medium-term. We use the model to establish stylized facts on the euro area and cross-country heterogeneity over the business cycle. In the third chapter, using confidential firm-level data from the National Bank of Belgium, I document the heterogeneous response of firms’ markups to the 2008 financial crisis. Overall, markups increased in the aftermath of the crisis and the effect was larger for highly financially constrained firms. I sho, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

In this introductory Chapter the rationale for this research is explained and an overview of the thesis is provided. This chapter serves as a concise introduction to the subject of the knowledge base and knowledge pipelines in a metropolis as Brussels, as well as providing an insight into the policy driven empirical research with additional focus on the appropriate spatial level of analysis to highlight the spatial inequality of innovation. The objectives of the thesis are reviewed by giving an overview of the research questions and the main hypotheses related to them. The theoretical background used in this thesis is briefly outlined. The structure of the thesis can be summarised as follows. The second chapter provides basic information about data on patents and scientific publications, the construction of indicators based on patents and scientific publications, as well as guidelines for the compilation and interpretation of patent and scientific publication indicators. The third chapter focuses on the determinants of the efficiency levels across regions in Belgium at different spatial levels. The fourth chapter builds on the research made in the previous chapters and focuses on the analysis of the impact of patent collaboration networks on the output growth of R&D active companies in Belgium. The fifth chapter analyses the impact of different collaboration ties on the productivity of innovative companies in Belgium, measured in several ways through the innovation survey and in terms of patents. The conclusion reported in the last chapter summarises the main findings and highlight possible suggestions for future research., Benchmarking exercises are increasingly used as an assessment instrument to guide policy-makers. They contribute to policy-making in three broad ways: delineating and monitoring development and progress; facilitating the exchange and gathering of knowledge on practices and policies; and promoting the image and attractiveness of economies. This research complements existing information about the Brussels Regional Innovation System (BRIS) with additional data that is less frequently available through current channels or difficult to make public due to the number of data manipulations. This research illustrates the Brussels innovation system by focusing on various aspects related to intra- and interregional connections. The dataset is based on scientific publications and patents over the period 1993-2013 containing at least one author with an affiliation or one inventor located in the Brussels-Capital Region, Vienna and Berlin. Patents and scientific publications provide a clear picture of the nature of technological change and innovation. Moreover, these sources give some further indication of R&D activities in the field and the position and specialisation of countries. The main benefit of such indicators is the unique empirical characterization they provide of the way actors interact as a collective system of knowledge production and diffusion (OECD, 1996). The main objective of this work is to compare Brussels with Belgian regions, city agglomerations and districts, as well as with capital cities of metropolitan regions (Vienna and Berlin) in terms of patenting and producing scientific publications, in order to map and understand how knowledge exchange takes place when Brussels actors are involved and which partners, locations, scientific fields and technological sectors are preferred. The main focus is on providing basic information about patent and scientific publication data, the construction of indicators based on patents and scientific publications, as well as, The topic of the spatial pattern in R&D activities was investigated by several scholars. It is worthwhile to explore the dynamism and change of R&D activities’ spatial spread as R&D activities are very much a dynamic phenomenon and the consequences in terms of past growth of these activities have painted the current relative position of the regions. Analysing the determinants of the efficiency levels across Belgian regions at different spatial levels (3 regions, 10 provinces, 43 districts, and city agglomerations), we derive a regression based on the measurement of regional output growth by estimating an extended Cobb-Douglas production function based on a representative sample of Belgian R&D active firms over the period 2000-2013. We investigate the role played by knowledge (private and public R&D stocks) on the output growth by applying spatial econometric methods that account for both heteroscedasticity and spatial autocorrelation. The chapter focuses on the comparison of obtained results with previous studies based on Belgium. It turns out that a large part of output growth differences across the Belgian regions are explained by disparities in the endowments of these determinants., Although the literature on the relations between patents and output growth of R&D active companies has been widely investigated, there has been little research with respect to the impact of patent collaboration networks on the output growth of R&D active companies. Integrating theoretical developments from the literature, we propose and test a conceptual framework that allows us to explain to what extent patent collaboration networks affect output growth. Testing the framework by using a constructed company-level dataset for Belgium, the empirical analysis reveals that output growth is significantly influenced by patenting activities and by collaborative relations with respect to patents. The chapter focuses on two distinct spatial levels. First, the spatial reach of the patent collaboration network is considered. The findings show that output growth is higher when collaborative relations are internationally oriented. Second, the regional location of the company shows differences in patenting activity, patent collaboration, and the spatial reach of the patent collaboration network., Inter-organisational relations are a crucial aspect of knowledge flows, which are at the same time an important engine for innovation. Collaboration has become an ever more important feature of entrepreneurial strategy to innovate. Network ties facilitate companies’ innovative capabilities by acting as key sources for innovations, helping to access the resources and boosting knowledge transfer. This chapter analyses the impact of different collaboration ties on the productivity of innovative companies in Belgium, measured in several ways through the innovation survey (Community Innovation Survey) and in terms of patents (Patstat). Patent statistics are used as an objective measure for innovation. Unlike patent data, innovation surveys measure innovation activities carried out in companies. This chapter is primarily concerned with the following research question: do collaboration networks, as measured by innovation surveys (CIS database) and by invention applications (Patstat database), impact productivity growth in the same way? Further, this chapter focuses on an alternative spatial approach in order to look into the role played by proximate and distant inter-organisational networks among organisations. The findings show that the collaboration ties between companies are contributing the most to productivity growth followed by collaboration ties involving universities and government, public or private research institutes. Second, the spatial reach of the inter-organisational networks shows divergent impact on productivity performance of innovating companies., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This dissertation consists of three essays in which I study the political economy of trade agreements. Using detailed information from lobbying reports filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, I systematically explore the role played by both the winners and the losers of globalization. The first chapter focuses on the winners, large multinational firms lobbying in favor of the ratification of free trade agreements. The second chapter looks at these winners when they lose, studying the impact of the non-ratification of a trade agreement on their profits. The last chapter focuses on labor interests and trade unions, the losers of globlalization.The first chapter (joint with Paola Conconi and Mathieu Parenti) is focused on firms. We show that the political economy of free trade agreements (FTAs) is dominated by large firms engaged in international trade that support the ratification of these agreements. We develop a model of endogenous lobbying on FTAs by heterogeneous firms, which can explain why only large pro-FTA firms select into lobbying. The model also delivers predictions on the intensive margin of lobbying. In line with these predictions, we find that larger firms spend more supporting a given FTA, and individual firms spend more supporting FTAs that generate larger gains – i.e. larger improvements in access to foreign consumers and suppliers and smaller increases in domestic competition – and that are more likely to be opposed by politicians.The second chapter (joint with Moritz Hennicke) is an event study on the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and the subsequent shock to U.S. trade policy – the non-ratification of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). We provide empirical evidence that corporate lobbying on trade agreements matters for corporate profits. We find that stock prices of companies that lobbied in favor of the TPP underperformed following Trump’s election. On the intensive margin, we find a strong and positive relationship between the amount spent, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This thesis explores the entire cycle of education, from initial access to schooling, over degree completion, to returns to education. Despite recent gains in increasing access, an tens of millions of children worldwide are still out of school. Abolishing school fees has increased enrollment rates in several countries where enrollments were low and fees were high. However, such policies may be less effective, or even have negative consequences, when supply-side responses are weak. The first part of the thesis evaluates the impacts of a tuition waiver program in Haiti, which provided public financing to nonpublic schools conditional on not charging tuition. The chapter concludes that school's participation in the program results in more students enrolled, more staff, and slightly higher student-teacher ratios. The program also reduces grade repetition and the share of overage students. While the increase in students does not directly equate to a reduction in the number of children out of school, it does demonstrate strong demand from families for the program and a correspondingly strong supply response from the nonpublic sector.Pertaining degree completion, it is well established that natural disasters can have a negative effect on human capital accumulation. However, a comparison of the differential impacts of distinct disaster classes is missing. Using census data and information from DesInventar and EMDAT, two large disaster databases, the second part of the thesis assesses how geological disasters and climatic shocks affect the upper secondary degree attainment of adolescents. The chapter focuses on Mexico, given its diverse disaster landscape and lack of obligatory upper secondary education over the observed time period. While all disaster types are found to impede attainment, climatic disasters that are not infrastructure-destructive (e.g. droughts) have the strongest negative effect, decreasing educational expansion by over 40%. The effects seem largely driven, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

In 2019, the NGO Freedom House entitled its annual report “Democracy in retreat”. This report marked the 13th consecutive year of decline in overall freedom in the World. Freedom House attributes this decline to “the previous wave of democratization rolling back”. Democracy is losing ground in several places: leaders using an authoritarian rhetoric are flourishing whereas popular support for democracy is shrinking (Mounk, 2018). This democratic recession questions the performance of democracies (Diamond, 2015). Previous research showed that democracy is associated with higher growth (Acemoglu et al. 2019), higher education (Gallego, 2010) and higher development (Gerring et al. 2012). Those assessments, however, do not explain the challenges new democratic countries currently face or why many democracies recently rolled back. Comparing the performance of democracies with that of autocracies is not new. Back in ancient Greece, Plato already debated the risks of democracy (Plato, The Republic, Book VIII). Nevertheless, measuring the virtues of political regimes in such static terms has drawbacks. It disregards the history of a political regime and the specificities of political transitions. A tautological argument is that democracy materializes after a democratic transition and autocracy often after an autocratic reversal. These transitions are multifaceted. They breed uncertainty and/or stem from violent outbursts (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2001). They open a period of political instability by fueling claims over power and over wealth in the new polity (Higley and Burton, 1989). New regimes have to face specific challenges: setting new rules, dealing with former elites, stabilizing the new regime and facing new contestants (Clague 1996). Those elements interact with the intrinsic characteristics of political regimes. In order to measure the merits and disadvantages of different regimes, it then seems adequate to understand first what political transitions bring about and, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

My thesis focuses on the risk-taking behavior of financial agents, aiming particularlyat better understanding how risk attitudes can change over time. It alsoexplores the implications that these changes have on financial markets, and on theeconomy as a whole.The first paper, which is a joint work with Kim Oosterlinck and Andrey Ukhov,studies how risk aversion of financial markets’ participants is affected by the SecondWorld War. The literature links extreme events to changes in risk aversion but failsto find a consensus on the direction of this change. Moreover, due to data limitationsand difficulties in estimation of risk aversion, the speed of the change in risk aversionhas seldom been analyzed. This paper develops an original methodology to overcomethe latter limitation. To estimate changes in attitude toward risk, we rely on thedaily market prices of lottery bonds issued by Belgium. We provide evidence on thedynamic of risk attitude before, during and after the Second World War. We findsubstantial variations between 1938 and 1946. Risk aversion increased at the outbreakof the war, decreased dramatically during the occupation to increase again afterthe war. To our knowledge, this finding of reversal in risk attitude is unique in theliterature. We discuss several potential explanations to this pattern, namely changesin economic perspectives, mood, prospect theory, and background risk. While theymight all have played a role, we argue that habituation to background risk mostconsistently explains the observed behavior over the whole period. Living continuouslyexposed to war-related risks has gradually changed the risk-taking behavior ofinvestors.In the second paper, I derive a measure of risk aversion from asset prices andanalyze what are its main drivers. Given the complexity of eliciting risk aversionfrom asset prices, few papers provide empirical evidence on the dynamics of riskaversion in a long-term perspective. This paper tries to fill the gap. First, I provide, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

In the past decades, decentralization has become increasingly important in both developing and developed countries. Based on the standard decentralization theorem, policy makers believe that local governments are closer to citizens and know more about local contexts and needs than the national governments. Consequently, they can design policies leading to a more efficient allocation of public goods. Moreover, when accompanied by empowerment of local decision-makers, decentralization is supposed to make local politicians more accountable to voters in a way that national politicians are not. Yet, the effective implementation of decentralization policies may heavily rely on local institutions. This thesis contributes to a rising literature analyzing the political economics of decentralization, that is the extent to which local political dynamics may reinforce or jeopardies decentralization reforms, ultimately affecting the citizens' well-being. I consider three countries that have devolved power to local politicians to a different extent, and tackle three obstacles that may undermine the beneficial effects of decentralization reforms: first, strong political competition at the local level; second, the need for coordinating the provision of a local public good; the interaction between political competition and coordination needs on accountability and eventually the quality of a local public good. Political competition may hinder the beneficial effects of decentralization on stability in a post-war country like Burundi. After a long-lasting and devastating civil war, in 2010 Burundi organized the first local elections, with the hope of establishing political stability through democratic means. However, together with two co-authors, I show that such political decentralization partly failed. We use a unique dataset and geographic fixed effects to show that violence was higher in municipalities characterized by fierce political competition and acute polarization between dem, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This dissertation argues on the necessity for an efficient and credible recovery and resolution framework for central clearing counterparties (CCPs).Following the 2008 subprime crisis and the failure of Lehman Brothers, several reforms have been undertaken in order to reinforce the strength of the financial system and, in particular, the over the counter (OTC) derivatives market. Two streams of reforms are of particular relevance in the present context: a) The development of resolution regimes for financial institutions, in particular for systemic “too big to fail” banks. The key objectives of these resolution regimes are to ensure the continuity of the critical functions performed by systemic institutions, the preservation of financial stability and the protection of taxpayers (i.e. avoiding public bailouts). This stream completed regulatory initiatives to reinforce the existing prudential framework acknowledging the natural limits of the latter and the observed forbearance by supervisory authorities in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The academic literature analysing the development and implementation of resolution regimes for banks essentially looked at issues such as the respect of the shareholders’ fundamental rights, the existence of appropriate safeguards for creditors and the execution of bail-in operations. b) The obligation to clear centrally OTC derivatives markets in order to prevent and control the possible contagion of risks across the financial system. The objectives of this stream of reform are to increase the transparency of the OTC derivatives markets and reduce the counterparty credit risk in the system by forcing transactions through professional risk managers, i.e. central clearing counterparties (CCPs). This however assumes that CCPs have the capability and the capacity to manage this centralisation of risks. Therefore, the literature showed interest in the risk management practices of CCPs, in particular margining methodologies, and age, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This dissertation has as main interest how households make important decisions over time. In the first part of the thesis I am interested in some theoretical aspects of this broad research question, first: what are some behavioral aspects of individuals' choice over time? Second: how can preferences be aggregated within a household? The first question is discussed in Chapter1 where I study a behavioral model of choice over time, in which a consumer derives utility not only from consumption, which I refer to as `event utility', but already from anticipating future consumption events. Furthermore, a consumer also obtains a disutility from recall of previous consumption events, due to the feature that the latter then act as a form of an anchor point with which new consumption events are compared. This generates a form of reference-dependency inside the preference structure of a consumer. In Chapter 2, I address a new property, the non-intersecting Pareto curves, which allows an ordering over Pareto curves defined in a certain environment, e.g. the marriage market or the couple's utility possibility frontiers conditional on the choice of a public good. It is shown that the important property of transferable utility, which allows simple aggregation of preferences among individuals is not equivalent to the non-intersecting property of Pareto frontiers, whereas the latter also allows for (relatively) simple aggregation of preferences. In the last two chapters of this dissertation, I consider a couple of very important policy-related research questions. In Chapter 3, I study the incentives of individuals to invest in their own human capital through on-the-job training programs. I find empirical evidence which suggests that being married can impede on training incidence. This, not necessarily intuitive result, can be explained through a theoretical framework where, within a couple household members share resources through some (cooperative) bargaining process. In this case, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Whether you are trying to impress others, communicate efficiently, develop trust with your teammates or followers, or choose key partners to work with, you need to accurately anticipate what others think of you. This process, which is called meta-perception (Laing, Phillipson, & Lee, 1966), is thus crucial for your day-to-day life, and also at work. Still, meta-perception fails to be considered as a key individual process in the field of Organizational Behavior – OB. Therefore, this dissertation aims to gather empirical and theoretical evidence showing that meta-perception is an important process for organizational life. Thus, this dissertation focuses on the process itself (i.e. meta-perception and meta-accuracy), its antecedents and its outcomes, applied to social evaluation situations that are common at work. First, I aim to provide the bases of a consensual and context-specific approach of meta-perception enabling its study in the field of OB by differentiating the manifestations of meta-accuracy and by using statistical methods that consider both components of meta-accuracy, namely meta-perception and other-perception (Edwards, 1995, 2002; Shanock, Baran, Gentry, Pattison, & Heggestad, 2010). Second, I aim to examine whether meta-perception, its bias and its accuracy are affected by specific antecedents (i.e. narcissism and leadership style) that have received growing attention in OB. Third, I aim to study the effect of meta-perception and its accuracy on outcomes usually influenced by person perception, such as performance and hireability, and characterized by social evaluation. To achieve these aims, four research projects were performed (i.e. three empirical projects, gathering eight studies, and one theoretical project). The first project examines the link between narcissistic tendencies and a specific form of meta-perception. The second project tests the effect of leadership style on the accuracy of meta-perception and whether this accuracy has a positive, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

In this thesis, I analyze the impacts of the design and implementation of different environmental policy tools from a theoretical and empirical perspective: certificates providing information on the energy performance of buildings (chapter 1); urban road pricing schemes such as congestion charges (chapter 2); quantity-based policy tools to support production with non-polluting technologies (chapter 3).In chapter 1, co-authored with Luisa Dressler, we study how energy performance certificates (EPCs) impact the residential rental market. These certificates can help solve information asymmetries between landlords and tenants about the thermal quality of dwellings for rent, which, in turn, is expected to facilitate investment aimed at improving dwellings' energy performance. However, disclosure of EPCs is often incomplete, which hampers their effectiveness in relieving such information asymmetries. Moreover, even when a certificate is available, landlords do not always disclose it. This contradicts the so-called information unraveling result, according to which all landlords should disclose quality information unless it is costly to do so: in such a setting, information eventually unravels. Using a cross-sectional dataset of residential rental advertisements from the Belgian region of Brussels, we empirically evaluate incentives to disclose energy performance ratings. We find that two fundamental assumptions underlying the unraveling result are not confirmed in our setting: firstly, tenants value energy performance of rental property only when dwellings are of very high quality; secondly, tenants do not appear to rationally adjust their expectations when faced with dwellings that withhold their energy performance rating. Finally, we formulate specific policy advice for reforming EPC mechanisms to increase disclosure rates.In chapter 2, I study how urban congestion pricing impacts the use of sustainable mobility options such as bike sharing, presenting evidence from the, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This thesis investigates the evolutionary foundation of the Innovation System concept and the quantitative techniques that could be used for a systemic evaluation of innovation policies. This topic has been covered through 6 chapters, Chapter I: The innovation system concept, which is the central concept of this thesis, finds its foundations in the evolutionary theory of economics and the Schumpeterian point of view on the co-evolution of innovation, organizations and institutions. Developed by Nelson and Winter in 1982, this theory is based on the idea that the surviving firms on the markets are not necessarily the ones that maximize their profits. Indeed, their ability to survive is reinforced by the development of internal organizational routines allowing for a fast adaptation to their changing environment. Thus, when assessing performances in terms of innovation in general, the single firm should not by the only centre of attention anymore. The entire environment surrounding its innovation activities should by analysed to understand the conditions underlying its failure or success. The definition of the innovation system (IS) concept finds its roots in this theory: the environment in which innovation activities take place is as important as the decision of the single innovation actor. Defined as all the institutions and organizations involved in the creation and diffusion of new knowledge and technology, the IS includes not only stakeholders of the innovation process, but also all the transversal sectors affecting innovation near or far: labour market, finance, and education… In such a context, the main justification for public intervention shifted from the market failures described by the neo-classical theory, to systemic failures, i.e. the dysfunctions of the IS, on which governments may take actions. And this shift in the policy rationale also leads to specific evaluation techniques of public initiatives., Chapter II: The IS concept is defined as all the institutions and organizations involved in the creation, diffusion and absorption of new knowledge and technology. An important question is raised by such a point of view: what is a system? What are its components? How does it foster innovation? This theoretical step is necessary to understand all the aspect of the innovation environment that are concerned by innovation policy design. How could a policy-maker integrate the systemic framework of the IS when initiating public action with the aim to improve performances in terms of science, technology and innovation? A large part of the economic literature is dedicated to the description of innovation systems. So the aim of this chapter consists of synthetizing the aspects referenced in the economic theory as the components of the IS in a normative exercise. First, the term “system” involves the articulation of several components and the relationships existing between them. Departing from this definition, three broad aspect of the IS are considered: the actors of the innovation process, the functions of the system and the resulting objectives that should be pursued by the stakeholders, and the instruments used by public authorities to intervene in such a systemic context. The actors involved in the innovation process are not only the recipient of a public policy, they are also policy makers, implementation agents and targets of the policy measures. The functions of the IS mainly concerns the creation, diffusion and absorption of new knowledge and technology. As the role of the State is to improve the performances of such a system, those functions should be considered as the objectives of public action. Finally, the instruments used by the State to reach these goals can also be detailed: innovation policies can be implemented through direct support measures (financial or fiscal tools), the improvement of the infrastructure allowing for the diffusion of innovation, or the, Chapter III: As the aim of this thesis is to develop analytical tools to integrate the IS point of view in public policy evaluation, the most important aspect of the work consisted in building an exhaustive database on innovation policies implemented in the EU28 Member States and its main non-EU competitors (Australia, China, Japan, the US, India, the Russian Federation, Brazil, South Korea and Canada). This database was constructed in the context of the ENIRI study conducted by the European Commission, between 2013 and 2015. This long-lasting work involved the collection of information concerning the innovation policy measures implemented in all the considered countries, both at the national and regional levels. This information was related to the IS dimensions highlighted in previous chapter. The main sources for data collection were the RIO (former Erawatch) and OECD STIP databases, the RIM Plus Monitor and national sources (Ministry websites), as well as national experts. The budgets was also included or estimated for the 2007-2013 period. Once the data were collected, the policy measures were classified according to the theoretical canvas developed through the taxonomy of chapter II. Functional matrices combining different aspects of the IS allowed for detailed information on the distribution of policy measures among the different dimensions of the system. For example, it is possible to estimate the percentage of policy measures implemented in one country that are dedicated to the fundamental research activities in SMEs. This distribution has been computed both in absolute and budget terms. This difference provided information on the contrast existing between governmental claims and intentions in terms of innovation policies and the effective use of money dedicated to the announced target. Indeed, it is not because a substantial number of policies are dedicated to a specific sector of beneficiary that the allocated budget will be more important. Thus, this poli, Chapter IV: The evolutionary foundations of the IS concept imply that there is no general equilibrium describing an ideal situation to which a specific case can be compared. In other words, there is no optimal innovation system, and no ideal configuration that should be imitated by the others. This absence of equilibrium and the systemic point of view adopted in this context lead to the use of alternative techniques to evaluate performances and policies. As suggested by Edquist (2006), this has to be done through a diagnosis of the IS, consisting in the identification of the systemic failures, and the elaboration of strategy to fix the problem. This demarche will be investigated in this chapter of the thesis and the following. In this section, a diagnosis of the IS of 37 countries (28 EU and their 9 non-EU competitors) will be realized through a typology based on innovation performances indicators. The aim of such an analysis is to see whether the different IS can be gathered in groups sharing the same characteristics, relative strengths and weaknesses. The expected results should reveal groups of countries sharing the same configurations in terms of innovation process, and facing the same type of weaknesses, dysfunctions or systemic failures. By doing so, one should be able to identify the needs of each IS, i.e. the components that may need improvement and eventually public intervention. To do so, a principal component analysis and a hierarchical ascendant clustering technique have been implemented on the 37 IS, revealing 4 clusters of countries, depending on their NIS characteristics and advancement: 1) The Asian economies, 2) The lagging-behind and catching-up NIS, 3) The small opened systems, 4) The technological leaders. This analysis has been realized for the 2003-2005 and 2013-2015 periods, revealing that, if the general features of the clusters do not tend to change over time, some countries faced a change a modification of their status: Korea left the Asian, Chapter V: Innovation policy typologyThis chapter is focused on the construction of an innovation policy typology based on the distributions of policies obtained in the database presented in chapter III. The results of this typology will be compared with the diagnosis realized in previous section to see if the weaknesses and needs of the NIS are effectively targeted by public action in innovation. Also, the aspects that could enhance or weaken such action, and their combination with other component of the NIS could be better understood. To this purpose, a multiple factor analysis has been implemented on the distributions of policy measures in terms of NIS components, followed by a hierarchical ascendant clustering, revealing groups of countries sharing the same characteristics in terms of policy design and implementation. 34 NIS have been examined (India, Brazil and Russia have been removed from the sample due to the bad quality of the information), using both the budget-weighted and non-budget-weighted distributions of measures on the 2007-2013 period. However, the results of this typology cannot be interpreted separately from the general innovation framework in which the public action is implemented. Indeed, countries having the same features in terms of beneficiaries and/or objectives in terms of policy do not necessarily share the same kind of IS. These implementation characteristics should rather be interpreted in light of the results obtained in the NIS diagnosis typology, in order to examiner if the public money effectively go where it is needed. In general, the different examined countries seem to effectively tackle their weaknesses, but countries facing the same types of problems do not implement the same type of policy mix, reinforcing the hypothesis that the innovation process is embedded in a large institutional framework that my orient public action in a direction rather than another. Two specific cases hold the attention in those results: South Korea, Chapter VI: The impact of macroeconomic and IS factors on the efficiency of public R&DAnother point of view can be adopted in an attempt to integrate the IS representations in policy evaluation techniques: the analysis of their impact on the efficiency of public R&D in leveraging private investments. In this chapter, a combination of two types of analysis is used to examine the problematic: the study of the efficiency of public R&D expenditure and its determinants on one hand, and the investigation of a possible crowding out effect of public R&D on the private one on another hand. The crowding out effect is translated into efficiency analysis, considering the BERD funded by government as an input, and the BERD funded by business as an output. And if an increase in the output leads to a decrease in the output, public intervention is considered to crowd out private initiative, as the firm may decide to replace its own investment with public money, instead of using it as an extra resource to increase its R&D activities. In this context, the IS as environment of R&D activities can be seen as a determinant of this efficiency, as it can strengthen or weaken this crowding out effect. The question asked in this section is the following: how to quantify and model the interdependencies existing between the different components of a NIS in order to integrate them in a quantitative analysis. This has been done in this study by implementing factorial analysis (Buesa, 2010) on a set of indicators collected in the Global Competitiveness Index database, and considered as descriptors of the different aspects of the innovation system. Those IS factors are: 1) the general STI environment, 2) the accessibility of the financial markets, 3) the internationalization of the system, 4) barriers to entrepreneurship and 5) the flexibility of labour regulation. Afterwards, these variables have been added as efficiency determinants in a stochastic frontier model assessing a possible crowding ou, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Embedding social and financial goals into investment decisions and organizational missions is an increasing hallmark of social finance, a rapidly growing phenomenon that aims to create sustainable solutions to some of society’s largest challenges such as poverty alleviation (Mosley & Hulme, 1998; Burgess & Pande, 2005; Beck et al. 2007a), wealth inequality (Buera et al. 2014; Lagoarde-Segot, 2017) and environmental preservation (Nicholls & Pharoah, 2008) among others (Benedikter, 2011). In recent years, the concept of social finance has emerged through applications such as venture philanthropy (Moody, 2008; Scarlata & Alemany, 2010), socially responsible investing (Renneboog et al. 2008; Nofsinger & Varma, 2014; Gutiérrez-Nieto et al. 2016), impact investing (Bugg-Levine & Emerson, 2011; Höchstädter & Scheck, 2015), corporate social responsibility (Falck & Heblich, 2007; Jha & Cox, 2015), crowdfunding sites that appeal to the charitable intentions of retail investors (Lehner, 2013; Lehner & Nicholls, 2014) and microfinance (Morduch, 1999; Beck et al. 2007b; Armendáriz & Labie, 2011). The microfinance industry is particularly suited to explore the nuances of social finance due to the wide range of actors present in the sector, including not only public, private and nonprofit actors (D’Espallier et al. 2016) but also a wide range of investor profiles including commercial rate, concessionary and fully donative funders (Dorfleitner et al, 2017). To meet these innovations in social finance, a substantial body of scholarly research has materialized in various areas: corporate finance (Bogan, 2012; Tchuigoua, 2014), investing (Dorfleitner et al. 2012; Brière & Szafarz, 2015), nonprofit finance (Jegers, 2011; Roberts, 2013), banking (Gutiérrez-Nieto et al. 2009; Cornée et al. 2016), entrepreneurship (Nicholls, 2010; Bruton et al. 2015), development economics (Cull et al. 2009; Ahlin et al. 2011; Hermes et al. 2011; Hartarska et al. 2013), business ethics (Sandberg et al. 20, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Performance management has been called the defining contemporary challenge facing public organizations. While we cannot pretend to elucidate all its mysteries, we hope to provide solid evidence for a better comprehension of the social underpinnings of performance management. We believe that these articles contribute to the existing literature, offer new perspectives on the issues, and provide a coherent overview of the dynamics that surround performance information in public organizations. It has long been known in public administration that performance management was there to stay, warts and all, because its potential was just too great to ignore. Hopeful, this research will provide insights for managers on how to strive for effective performance management in their organizations., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Using public support as the baseline, the aim of the Ph.D. thesis is firstly to assess its effectiveness in alleviating firms’ financing constraints (Chapter 2) and in enhancing the innovation-growth linkage (Chapter 5), in comparison with other financing sources. Secondly, the research undertaken also explores public policy effectiveness in two periods of time: ex-ante and ex-post analysis. In the former, effectiveness is assessed according to whether the characteristics of the project selected for the subsidy are in line with the policy targets (Chapter 3). In turn, the ex-post analysis assesses firms’ effectiveness in achieving the planned goal and the sustainability of the achieved outcomes (Chapter 4). Chapter 2 provides evidence that, in addition to a guarantee for loans, measures to facilitate equity investments and making existing public measures easier to obtain could be considered as the main solutions for future financing. Tax incentives for financially constrained firms are revealed to be the least important factor. Chapter 3 aims to understand which kinds of projects are selected for an innovation subsidy and if the characteristics of the project selected are in line with the policy target. The results show the selection process seems to be particularly effective in meeting the goals as regards the amount of investment, as well as the expected effect on enhanced internationalization and productivity. Nevertheless, the study also reveals some failures in the selection process, namely in terms of the intensity of the project’s contribution to growth. Chapter 4 assess firm performance after project implementation. Results show that subsidized firms reached targets linked with employment level and sales more easily than labour productivity and value creation. Chapter 5 reveals that equity financing has a greater effect on the strategic decision to innovate and the highest output additionality on firm turnover growth. Grants have a more moderate effect on in, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This thesis consists of three chapters. The first two are regarding the political economy of international trade, the third is about empirical banking.Chapter 1 is titled "Suspiciously Timed Trade Disputes" and it is the result a joint work with Paola Conconi, David DeRemer, Georg Kirchsteiger, and Maurzio Zanardi. This Chapter is already published in the Volume 105 of the Journal of International Economics and it shows that electoral incentives crucially affect the initiation of trade disputes. Focusing on WTO disputes filed by the United States during the 1995-2014 period, we find that U.S. presidents are more likely to initiate a dispute in the year preceding their re-election. Moreover, U.S. trade disputes are more likely to involve industries that are important in swing states. To explain these regularities, we develop a theoretical model in which re-election motives can lead an incumbent politician to file trade disputes to appeal to voters motivated by reciprocity. The second chapter, titled "Trade Policy and the China Syndrome", analyzes how trade policy can be used to smooth the effects of trade liberalizations. The recent backlash against free trade is partially motivated by the decline in manufacturing employment due to rising import competition from China. Politicians in high-income countries have extensively used antidumping (AD) measures and other temporary trade barriers to protect their economies from rising Chinese imports. To estimate the causal effect of trade protection on industry outcomes, I construct a new instrument for AD measures based on the importance of an industry in swing states and the industry's experience at filing AD petitions. In this paper, I first show that trade policy contained the rise of Chinese imports in protected sectors, decreasing the annual growth rate of US imports from China in a range between 3% and 14% compared to the non-protected sectors. Second, I show that these protectionist measures have contained the "China, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This dissertation investigates the role of reference-dependent preferences in different areas of application, both from an empirical/experimental and a theoretical perspective. Despite their common focus, all chapters are self-contained and can be read independently. In the first chapter, entitled "Does Loss Aversion Beat Procrastination? A Behavioral Health Intervention at the Gym", I analyze the implications of reference-dependent preferences in the domains of self-control and optimal incentive design. Financial incentives are a common tool to encourage overcoming self-control problems and developing beneficial habits. There are different means by which such incentives can be provided, yet, up to date there is little empirical evidence on the relative effectiveness of different incentive designs. I present the results of a field experiment that explores whether and how incentives that are economically equivalent but framed differently affect the likelihood of exercising at a gym. I find that framing incentives in terms of losses, meaning individuals lose cash incentives by not exercising, encourages more frequent visits to the gym than framing incentives in terms of financial gains. After removing these incentives, I observe habit formation in gym exercise only if incentives were framed as losses rather than gains. The findings are consistent with the concept of reference-dependent preferences and loss aversion and suggest that cost reductions and performance improvements can be achieved if opting to frame incentives in terms of losses. The second chapter, entitled "Salience-adjusted Expectation-based Reference Points: Theory and Experiment", studies the consequences of reference-dependent preferences in the domain of decision making under uncertainty. Recent theories of expectation-based reference-dependent preferences offer a structured approach of the formation of reference points, yet do not incorporate important context-specific characteristics. One implicit, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The advent of experimental methodologies have led to decisive progress in the study of corrupt behaviour in the last two decades. Since they can complement survey data and perception indexes with controlled experimental data, scholars and policy makers have reached a better understanding of decision-making in bribery situations and are able to design innovative anticorruption policies.In this thesis, I use experimental and empirical data to contribute to the field of the economics of corruption. The first two chapters of this PhD dissertation use experimental methodologies to study decision-making in a bribery scenario. The first chapter tests an anti-corruption strategy with a lab in the field experiment in Burundi. The second chapter studies the fairness concerns that might arise when dealing with redistribution in a bribery situation. The third chapter uses an empirical analysis to explore the controversial issue of political moonlighting, i.e. having outside activities while holding public office. It investigates "double-hat politicians", who combine mayor and parliamentary positions in Wallonia.In a first chapter, written with Jean-Benoit Falisse, we explore the effect of anti- corruption messages on corrupt behavior and public service delivery. In a novel lab-in-the-field experiment, 527 public servants from Burundi were asked to allocate rationed vouchers between anonymous citizens; some of these citizens attempted to bribe the public servants to obtain more vouchers than they were entitled to. Two groups of public servants were randomly exposed to short messages about good governance or professional identity reminders. Participants in these two groups behaved in a fairer manner than those of a third group who were not exposed to any message. The result is more robust in the case of the group exposed to the professional identity reminder. The underlying mechanisms seem to be that when a public servant reflects upon governance values and her professional ident, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This dissertation seeks to contribute to the policy discussion on how to design efficient and sustainable energy policies. In three self-contained chapters, it applies microeconomic theory and empirical analysis to identify three market failures in European energy markets and to evaluate specific policy measures that strive to overcome these failures in order to increase market efficiency and to enhance environmental or societal sustainability. Chapter 1 and 2 study European electricity markets, which play an important role in the transition towards a carbon-neutral energy future. Overcoming barriers to efficient electricity markets is a crucial step to keep the costs of this transition as low as possible to society. Both chapters focus on obstacles to electricity market efficiency that have recently been highlighted by the European Commission. On the supply side, subsidies for renewable electricity may distort production incentives and competition in wholesale electricity markets. Chapter 1 applies a theoretical model to study the effect of different subsidies on producer strategies and competition in wholesale electricity markets. On the demand side, the European Commission seeks to overcome the reluctance of residential electricity consumers to switch electricity supplier in order to ensure effective competition in the retail electricity market. Chapter 2 empirically quantifies different reasons for switching inertia using a structural discrete choice model and performs counterfactual analysis to study the effect of different policy measures that seek to overcome switching inertia. Chapter 3 looks at the building sector, which accounts for 40% of final energy consumption in Europe and is a major emitter of carbon emissions. In the residential housing market information asymmetries hamper incentives to invest in energy efficiency improvements of rental property. This chapter empirically analyzes the effect of a European policy that mandates the use of energy perfo, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

In Chapter 1, which is co-authored with Rossella Calvi and Arthur Lewbel, we show that a local average treatment effect (LATE) can sometimes be identified and consistently estimated when treatment is mismeasured, or when treatment is estimated using a possibly misspecified structural model. Our associated estimator, which we call Mismeasurement Robust LATE (MR-LATE), is based on differencing two different mismeasures of treatment. In our empirical application, treatment is a measure of empowerment: whether a wife has control of substantial household resources. Due to measurement difficulties and sharing of goods within a household, this treatment cannot be directly observed without error, and so must be estimated. Our outcomes are health indicators of family members. We first estimate a structural model to obtain the otherwise unobserved treatment indicator. Then, using changes in inheritance laws in India as an instrument, we apply our new MR-LATE estimator. We find that women's empowerment substantially decreases their probability of being anemic or underweight, and increases children's likelihood of receiving vaccinations. We find no evidence of negative effects on men's health. Then, using changes in inheritance laws in India as an instrument, we apply our new MR-LATE estimator. We find that women's empowerment substantially decreases their probability of being anemic or underweight, and increases children's likelihood of receiving vaccinations.In Chapter 2, which is co-authored with Alexander Wolf, we take the Dunbar et al (2013) (DLP) model and explore its strength and weaknesses at recovering information regarding household sharing of resources. DLP develop a collective model of the household that allows to identify resource shares, that is, how total household resources are divided up among household members. We show why, especially when the data exhibit relatively flat Engel curves, the model is weakly identified and induces high variability and an implausi, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The Thesis is composed by three complementary research investigations on the economic and policy aspects of EU corporate R&D.Collectively, the work first reviews the theoretical and empirical literature of corporate R&D intensity decomposition; it then investigates the EU R&D intensity and its decomposition elements comparatively with most closed competitors and with emerging economies over the period 2005-2013. Finally, it inspects further some key aspects that can be associated to the EU R&D intensity gap: sectoral dynamics and the resulting sectoral and technological specialisations as well as the drivers for R&D investment growth across sectors and firms' age groups of top R&D investing firms over time. These studies also address the possible policy implications that derive from their outcomes.The investigations rely on literature as well as on company data, mainly from nine editions (2006-2014) of the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. For analytical purposes they use literature review, meta-analysis, descriptive statistics, R&D intensity decomposition computational approach, Manhattan distance and Technological Revealed Comparative Advantage metrics, and a multinominal logit regression model. The results of these three research works are novel in several aspects. It indicates that literature results on R&D intensity decomposition differ because of data and methodological heterogeneities, and that the structural cause is the main determinant of EU R&D intensity gap if sector compositions of the countries are considered. It inspects how the use of different data sources and analytical methods impact differently on R&D intensity decomposition results, and what the analytical and policy implications are.The empirical research results of this Thesis confirm the structural nature of the EU R&D intensity gap. In the last decade the gap between the EU and the USA has widened, whereas the EU gap with Japan has remained relatively stable. In contrast, the emerging, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The commons is a concept increasingly used by practitioners and social activists with the promise of creating new collective wealth (Bollier & Helfrich, 2014; De Angelis, 2003; Hardt & Negri, 2009; Klein, 2001). In recent years, a variety of scholarly research explained the different ways of organizing commons (Van Laerhoven & Ostrom, 2007). To that end, many streams of inquiry have emerged in various areas: organization theory (Ansari et al. 2013; Fournier, 2013; Tedmanson et al. 2015), institutional economics (Hess, C. & Ostrom, 2011; Ostrom, 1990, 2005, 2010), political philosophy and legal studies (Dardot & Laval, 2014; Holder and Flessas, 2008; Hardt & Negri, 2009), nonprofit studies (Aligica, 2016; Bushouse et al. 2016; Lohmann, 2014, 2016) and business ethics (Argandoña, 1998; Melé, 2009, 2012; O’Brien, 2009; Sison & Fontrodona, 2012; Solomon, 2004). However, these different theories are usually conceived and used separately. Empirical research on commons has mainly focused on natural resources at local and global levels (Ansari et al. 2013; Cody et al. 2015; Cox & Ross, 2011; Galaz et al. 2012; Ostrom, 1990, 2010; Poteete et al. 2010), and also on digital and scientific resources (Benkler, 2006; Boyle, 2008; Cook‐Deegan & Dedeurwaerdere, 2006; Coriat, 2015; Hess & Ostrom, 2011). Despite a long research tradition in local community organizations, there is little empirical scientific knowledge that uses the lens of the commons to study shared resources that are neither natural nor informational in nature. This dissertation aims to fill these gaps by analyzing social finance services and organizations from an interdisciplinary perspective. The aim is to understand whether communities can create financial commons. By analyzing the processes involved, the dissertation sheds light on the social and institutional components enabling the creation of human-made commons. We focus on community organizations linked to the solidarity economy movement in Brazil. Such move, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, iiTSE, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

My PhD thesis focuses on two separate topics: (1) Issue salience and (ii) Political inequality. For each topic, I present one theoretical and one empirical analysis. Perhaps unsurprizingly, this sums up to 4 chapters.Chapter 1 (Political inequality, theoretical): "Immigration, Political Participation and Redistribution". Input: In this work in progress paper, I assess the effect of immigration on the political behavior of natives. Output: Plutocratic collective choice mechanisms rather than the law of supply and demand are responsible for the immigration worries of native unskilled workers.Chapter 2 (Issue salience, theoretical): "Electoral Competition through Issue Selection". Input: In this published paper, we assess the effect of priming on the intensity of electoral competition.Output: Policy innovation is more likely when the ability of parties to divert the attention of voters towards their "owned issues" is stronger.Chapter 3 (Issue salience, empirical): "The Leader and the ublic Under the Terror Threat".Input: In this work in progress paper, I assess the effect of a shock to the salience of an issue (terrorism) in the political preferences of agents.Output: Populist leaders' strategy to divide the public on key issues is less effective when a real threat actually arises.Chapter 4 (Political inequality, empirical): "The Depoliticized Participant".Input: In this preliminary essay, I assess the participation behavior of depoliticized individuals (ideological centrist or "don't knows"), typically neglected in the field.Output: Depoliticized individuals are alienated from politics rather than hostile to the democratic order., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This dissertation comprises four chapters, which mainly deal with female's participation in household decision-making, a very important aspect of female's bargaining power within the household and closely linked to female's empowerment. The first three chapters, which all deal with female's participation in household decision-making, are two sides of the same coin, in that while the first one delves into the determinants of female's participation in household decision-making, the second and third chapters deal with its beneficial consequences. The fourth chapter is linked with Chapter 1. As a matter of fact, the data used in Chapter 1 has been collected in Rural Burundi, in the framework of the FNRS/FRFC-funded project “Microfinance Services, Intra-household Behavior and Welfare in Developing Countries: A Longitudinal and Experimental Approach”, which funded my PhD scholarship. In 2012, the project funded data collection in Rural Burundi. In respect to the experimental component of the project, these are baseline data. The 2012 household survey targeted a sample of rural households that have been interviewed in 1998 and 2007. This is where the longitudinal design of the project comes into play. Independently from the experimental research, the longitudinal nature of the data, that is to say three waves of data (1998, 2007 and 2012), had the advantage of allowing panel analysis of interesting and relevant issues in development, including for example the long-term welfare effects of shocks at either individual or household levels.In Chapter 1, entitled “The Power of The Family: kinship and Intra-household Decision-making in Rural Burundi” and co-authored with Bram De Rock and Philip Verwimp, we delve into the determinants of female's participation in household decision-making, by laying a particular emphasis on the role of female's kinship. We show that in rural Burundi the characteristics of the female's kinship are highly correlated with her decision-making power. F, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This thesis is composed of three chapters that propose some novel approaches on tail risk for financial market and forecasting in finance and macroeconomics. The first part of this dissertation focuses on financial market correlations and introduces a simple measure of tail correlation, TailCoR, while the second contribution addresses the issue of identification of non- normal structural shocks in Vector Autoregression which is common on finance. The third part belongs to the vast literature on predictions of economic growth; the problem is tackled using a Bayesian Dynamic Factor model to predict Norwegian GDP.Chapter I: TailCoRThe first chapter introduces a simple measure of tail correlation, TailCoR, which disentangles linear and non linear correlation. The aim is to capture all features of financial market co- movement when extreme events (i.e. financial crises) occur. Indeed, tail correlations may arise because asset prices are either linearly correlated (i.e. the Pearson correlations are different from zero) or non-linearly correlated, meaning that asset prices are dependent at the tail of the distribution.Since it is based on quantiles, TailCoR has three main advantages: i) it is not based on asymptotic arguments, ii) it is very general as it applies with no specific distributional assumption, and iii) it is simple to use. We show that TailCoR also disentangles easily between linear and non-linear correlations. The measure has been successfully tested on simulated data. Several extensions, useful for practitioners, are presented like downside and upside tail correlations.In our empirical analysis, we apply this measure to eight major US banks for the period 2003-2012. For comparison purposes, we compute the upper and lower exceedance correlations and the parametric and non-parametric tail dependence coefficients. On the overall sample, results show that both the linear and non-linear contributions are relevant. The results suggest that co-movement increases du, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Les Jeunes Entreprises Technologiques (JET) ont des besoins financiers importants aux premiers stades tandis que la plupart des marchés des capitaux entrepreneuriaux restent moins développés en Europe qu’aux Etats-Unis. Cette situation conduit les pouvoirs publics à créer des dispositifs financiers, dont des subsides, pour soutenir ces JET. Selon la Public Sponsorship Theory, ces subsides devraient soulager le contrainte de financement qui pèse sur les JET et ainsi leur permettre de poursuivre leur développement jusqu’à attirer des investisseurs ou vivre de leurs ventes. Pour autant, l’évaluation empirique de ces subsides a produit des résultats critiques. Cette thèse étudie ces critiques à Bruxelles, un environnement européen interventionniste typique, en répondant à la question « Pourquoi les Jeunes Entreprises Technologiques font elles appel aux subsid¬¬es et comment ceux-ci affectent-ils leur développement?».Cette thèse est constituée d’articles de recherche réalisés à l’aide de stratégies qualitatives supportées par des études de cas. Le Chapitre 2 présente les études de cas de 10 JET et répond aux questions :« Comment les JET se financent-elles aux premiers stades ?» et « Quel est le rôle des aides publiques dans ces stratégies de financement ?». Il décrit un écosystème bruxellois où les JET parviennent à se financer mais où les subsides sont particulièrement présents à tous les stades. Le Chapitre 3 étudie la construction et la succession des tours de table au sein de 8 JET sur une période de trois ans après leur création. En particulier, il répond aux questions :« Les subsides répondent-ils à des contraintes de financement liées à un manque d’offre de fonds ?», « Pourquoi les JET font-elles appel aux subsides ?» et « Les subsides signalent-ils les JET aux investisseurs ?». Il souligne que l’opportunisme et la volonté d’éviter la dilution sont des motifs fréquents pour demander des subsides. Il met aussi en lumière que ces derniers sont fréquemment alloués se, New Technology-Based Firms (NTBF) have high financial needs at early stage while most European entrepreneurial equity markets remain less developed than in the United States. This threatens their development and the expected loss of regional spillovers pushes policy makers to create financial schemes such as grants to support them. According to Public Sponsorship Theory, grants should offer NTBF a relief from funding constraints and enable them to continue their development until they get support of investors or their sales allow self-financing. However, empirical evaluation of the relevance and impact of grants has been mostly critical. This PhD investigates these criticisms in Brussels, a typical western European interventionist region, by answering the question “Why do New Technology-Based Firms use grants and how do they affect their development?”.Our PhD is made of three empirical research papers carried out following qualitative research strategies resting on multiple case studies. Chapter 2 presents case studies of 10 NTBF to answer the questions: “How do NTBF finance themselves at early stages?” and “What is the role of public aids in these financing strategies?”. It describes a Brussels ecosystem in which NTBF manage to finance themselves but where grants are particularly present at every stage. Chapter 3 studies the design and succession of financing rounds within 8 NTBF over three years after incorporation. In particular, we answer the questions: “Are grants to NTBF answering to supply-sided financing constraints?”, “Why do NTBF apply for grants?” and “Are grants signalling NTBF to investors?”. It highlights that opportunism and the avoidance of dilution are common motives for grants applications and that these are regularly allocated following a “picking the winners’ strategy. Finally, Chapter 4 adopts a resource-based perspective by studying the role of grants within resource configurations of human, social and financial capital. Based on a sample of 31, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The last ten years have been extremely challenging for both researchers in monetary economics and policymakers.The Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009, in spite of its size and severity, was initially widely perceived in the Euro Area (EA) as an imported and transitory crisis: it was frequently predicted that the EA economy would recover once the US and the World Economy rebounded. Instead, after a brief period of recovery, the Euro Area was hit by the Sovereign Debt Crisis of 2011-12, a domestic crisis which widened the divide already existing between core and peripheral countries up to the point of threatening a break-up of the euro. Thanks to the bold monetary policy response of the ECB this fear gradually vanished, but the sudden fall in oil price and the uncertain economic outlook led to the low inflation period, particularly severe in the EA, in which inflation, both in terms of headline and core measures, is well below the ECB target of 2%. This prompted the ECB to launch its Quantitative Easing program, at the beginning of 2015, much later than what the FED implemented to offset the impact of the 2007-09 crisis.This dissertation consists of two different but interlinked parts, which contribute to the empirical literature on monetary policy, low inflation and the business cycle. The first part is composed by Chapters I and II, and it is devoted to analyse the EA economy, both before the Global Financial Crisis and during the most recent low inflation period. The second one, composed by Chapters III and IV, focuses on the US economy to evaluate the possible negative consequences of the extraordinary monetary stimulus undertaken by the FED. In particular, we study the risks for both price and financial stability of the effects of the so called lift-off, i.e. the gradual normalization of monetary stance. In the first Chapter, we provide novel evidence on the different effects of the ECB common monetary policy on euro-area core and peripheral countries even befo, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This thesis is concerned with a fundamental unit of the economy: Households. Even in advanced economies, upwards of 70% of the population live in households composed of multiple people. A large number of decisions are taken at the level of the household, that is to say, they are taken jointly by household members: How to raise children, how much and when to work, how many cartons of milk to purchase. How these decisions are made is therefore of great importance for the people who live in them and for their well-being.But precisely because household members make decisions jointly it is hard to know how they come about and to what extent they benefit individual members. This is why households are often viewed as unique decision makers in economics. Even if they contain multiple people, they are treated as though they were a single person with a single set of preferences. This unitary approach is often sufficient and can be a helpful simplification. But in many situations it does not deliver an adequate description of household behavior. For instance, the unitary model does not permit the study of individual wellbeing and inequality inside the household. In addition, implications of the unitary model have been rejected repeatedly in the demand literature.Bargaining models offer an alternative where household members have individual preferences and come to joint decisions in various ways. There are by now a great number of such models, all of which allow for the study of bargaining power, a measure of the influence a member has in decision making. This concept is important because it has implications for the welfare of individuals. If one household member’s bargaining power increases, the household’s choices will be more closely aligned with that member’s preferences, ceteris paribus.The three chapters below can be divided into two parts. The first part consists of Chapter 1, which looks to detect the influence of intra-household bargaining in a specific set of consumpt, Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The overarching question of this dissertation is in what ways complementary currencies (CC) systems can contribute to environmental sustainability from an institutional and ecological economics perspective. More particularly, the research focuses on household energy consumption, as it is an important target for policy makers in the EU. The first three chapters focus on the emerging trend of using CC systems as top-down instruments for environmental sustainability. Our findings relate to developing a taxonomy of these systems, designing new top-down CC systems adapted to the context of energy savings in the household sector, exploring the influence of these new systems on the quality of motivation in the light of Self-Determination Theory and investigating the acceptability and effectiveness of these systems. In the fourth and last chapter of this dissertation, we approach our research question from a bottom-up angle and, using an inductive methodology, we explore how community currencies could act as an organising instrument capable of helping cohousing communities achieve their energy-efficiency potential. Finally, we conclude by highlighting our contributions regarding the structure and important features of these systems, how they can be used in an ecological economics paradigm, and how they can set rules for collective action in an institutional perspective., Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion, iiTSE, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished