Matheus DE SOUZA BUENO will defend his thesis on Friday 24 June at 05:00 PM on Zoom meeting.
«Essays on Economic Development, International Trade and Public Policy»
To get the zoom link, please ask the secretariat Elvire Jalran
Supervisor: Professor Stéphane STRAUB
Memberships are:
- Stéphane STRAUB UT1 - Toulouse School of Economics, supervisor
- Marc-Andreas MUENDLER University of California, San Diego, Rapporteur
- Miren LAFOURCADE Université Paris-Saclay , Rapporteure
- Emmanuelle AURIOL UT1 - Toulouse School of Economics, Examiner
Abstract :
Economic development often involves balancing efficiency and equity objectives, and public policies are the main tools to strike this balance. Yet, even though many policies have been evidenced to individually affect economic development, less is known about how they can be combined to increase their benefits and decrease their distributional costs. This thesis, in most part, provides evidence on the role of policy complementarity on economic development in the context of market integration reforms. In the first chapter of this thesis, I provide causal evidence that access to transport infrastructure modulated the effects of a trade liberalization episode across local economies within Brazil. I show that, while higher tariff cuts similarly led to labor market disruption across local economies, those also benefiting from increased access to road corridors experienced stronger reallocation of resources and establishment dynamics geared towards higher productivity growth. In the second and co-authored chapter, we show that, in the same context of the first chapter, the provision of job training programs that were well-targeted at local skills demand were effective in reverting the negative impacts of trade opening on employment growth, particularly among low-skilled workers. Lastly, I deviate from market integration reforms and policy complementarity to analyze another aspect of economic development: environmental externalities. In the third and co-authored chapter, we analyze the effectiveness of a Unit Pricing System (UPS), a widely adopted form of Pigouvian fee, in reducing waste generation in Italy. Using the synthetic control method, we show that the policy was effective, with a significant decrease of the priced waste stream. This effect was driven by behavioral changes towards waste avoidance and, to a smaller extent, recycling.
