ESSAYS ON PUBLIC GOOD DECISIONS The Role of Context at the Micro and Macro levels

Abstract

This thesis is a collection of submitted or published papers that I wrote during my four years of doctoral studies in development economics at the NADEL Institute of the ETH Zurich. The general idea for this thesis is to address how social decisions (decisions involving socially relevant goods or services) are influenced by their environmental context. The definition of the environmental context was deliberately broad to accommodate different settings, from micro-decision at the individual level to aggregated macro-analysis of economic activity. The four papers that comprise this thesis all have a strong common thread which is the influence of external environmental contexts on the optimal decisions of agents. These contexts can be the existence of risk (first paper), the influence of group decisions (second paper), the existence of environmental services (third paper) or the recognition of climate change impacts at the global level (fourth paper). In each case, the nature of the exogenous context greatly influences the optimal decisions and in turn gives information about the choices of the best policy frameworks. These papers cover the two research fields that were at the center of my research during the PhD: empirical decision theory for individuals in developing countries and the analysis of forestry and adaptation strategies in developing countries in the context of climate finance. These topics are examples of the different layers of analysis that permeate the economic analysis of social and collective decisions, from individual preferences to macroeconomic strategies. The papers comprising this thesis also share the same policy objective, albeit at different levels: how are our decisions impacting the welfare of developing countries and poor people?