This thesis addresses welfare measurement issues, with an emphasis on the measurement of happiness and inequality. It contributes to the economic literature in both methodological and empirical terms, with the empirical analysis employing the PACO/CHER, ECHP and GSS datasets. Although human...

Regulation in pharmaceutical markets is pervasive in most countries, especially in Europe. The nature of existing regulations is diverse, as they serve a number of purposes: guaranteeing safety, efficacy and security of drug usage; but also ensuring patients access to treatment, preserving...

Economies with asymmetric information are encompassed by an extension of the model of general competitive equilibrium that does not require an explicit modeling of private information. Sellers have discretion over deliveries on contracts; this is in common with economies with default, incomplete...

The European University Institute and the Wharton Financial Institutions Center held a conference in Florence, Italy in April 2011 that brought together leading economists, lawyers, historians and policy makers to discuss the current economic situation in the Eurozone with particular emphasis on...

The topic of this thesis is decision-making under risk. I focus my analysis on expected utility theory by von Neumann and Morgenstern. I am especially interested in modeling risk attitudes represented by Bernoulli utility functions that belong to the following classes: Constant Absolute Risk...

In this thesis how labour markets are affected by globalisation is examined. The thesis takes the form of three chapters. The first chapter looks at the state of trade unions in Europe and how they have been affected by globalisation; the second chapter is theoretical in nature and shows how the...

One of the most relevant events of the last decades has been the fast integration of international financial markets. As most restrictions to cross-border asset trade were removed, the volume of activity in international financial markets increased dramatically, and so did the cross-country...

This thesis consists of three chapters that examine different aspects of frictional labor markets in a DSGE framework. In particular, my thesis investigates the implications of different wage bargaining regimes, labor adjustment costs, and endogenous on-the-job search. The third chapter...

Network economics is a fast growing area of study, with a lot of potential for addressing a wide variety of socio-economic phenomena. Networks literally permeate our social and economic lives. The unemployed find jobs using the information and assistance of their friends and relatives. Consumers...

The first chapter aims at assessing the importance of political connections for the profitability of privately owned firms. The value of connections is estimated using a unique quasi-natural experiment: The September 2006 Thai coup d’état. Connections are found to be potentially very...