The 2009 European Report on Development analyses the costs and characteristics of fragility (Section 1), the capacity of fragile countries to cope with negative shocks such as the 2008-09 financial crisis (Section 2), and the EU’s current engagement with fragile countries as well as the...

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...

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This thesis is composed by four independent chapters. Their common denominator is the process of human capital accumulation analyzed under different perspectives and using different techniques. In the following I will shortly describe each chapter in more detail. Chapter 1 addresses an important...

This thesis deals with different topics on international macroeconomics, in particular on business cycles in small open economies, the motives for net foreign asset accumulation and the transmission of shocks in an international framework. The three chapters deal with very different issues and...

This thesis consists of an analysis of different aspects of optimal fiscal policy in dynamic economies, with a special emphasis on the consequences of dropping the assumption of full commitment to future policies: the Third Best environment. As is now well known in the dynamic optimal taxation...

This thesis deals with a number of different topics in the field of international macroeconomics. It proposes theoretical models of the open economy to think about and analyze questions such as the effects of financial globalization, countries' external adjustment mechanism, international...

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