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This thesis consists of three chapters contributing to the broad field of financial economics. In the first chapter, I develop a theoretical model of bank bail-ins in order to analyze the effects of the implementation of such resolution mechanism on banks' behavior and on their financing capacity. The results from the model show that introducing bail-ins may have undesirable consequences in terms of social welfare when financial markets are characterized by moral hazard. Chapter 2 is devoted to an empirical investigation of the effects of informationless capital flows - coming from monthly rebalancings in the largest local-currency governmentdebt index for emerging countries - on the price and liquidity of sovereign bonds. I find capital flows to increase the returns on government bonds as well as their liquidity. Also, they spill over to the exchange rate market, with larger inflows prompting larger currency appreciations. Finally, the third and last chapter of this work contains an essay on financial literacy and asset evaluation. By designing and running a laboratory experiment, I find that increasing financial literacy - even with a short training - can substantially increase the value agents assign to a risky financial asset. This evidence is consistent with the results from a simple model of asset evaluation in presence of ambiguity averse agents. ; Esta tesis consiste de tres capítulos que pertenecen al campo de la economía financiera. En el primer capítulo, desarrollo un modelo teórico de bail-in bancario para analizar los efectos de la implementación de este nuevo mecanismo de resolución sobre el comportamiento de los bancos y sus capacidad de obtener fondos. Los resultados del modelo demuestran que la introducción de bail-ins puede repercutir negativamente sobre el bienestar social cuando los mercados financieros están caracterizados por un problema de moral hazard. El segundo capítulo es destinado a un estudio empírico de los efectos de los flujos internacionales de capitales - que resultan del ...

The empirical analysis of the effects of government policies on the incentives of economic agents is the leitmotif of the present thesis, with two distinct fields of application. While the first essay mostly contributes to the empirical banking literature, with a focus on the link between implicit guarantees for bank debt and political connections in Europe, the second one contributes to the field of education economics and is devoted to an analysis of the effects of bibliometric-based hiring and promotion schemes in Italian public universities on scholars' productivity. The two essays also share some methodological affinities. First, the two projects exploit two different identification strategies that have the common ambition of isolating and estimating a causal effect of public policies on the outcomes of interest. Second, the two works are characterized by the use of two original datasets, that have been obtained merging multiple sources of data, some of them pre-existing and others that have been hand-collected. Finally, the two essays share the novelty of the research questions they aim to answer, which are relatively unexplored by the existing literature.

Abstract
We investigate how promotion incentives affect the productivity of a large sample of high-skilled public employees: academics. In a fuzzy regression-discontinuity design, we exploit the three bibliometric thresholds of the 2012 National Scientific Qualification (NSQ), the centralized evaluation procedure regulating career advancements in Italian universities. We compare the 2013–16 research productivity of assistant professors barely qualified for associate professor—whose next goal becomes meeting the higher thresholds for the full professor qualification—with the productivity of candidates who barely miss the qualification—whose goal remains meeting the associate professor thresholds. We find that barely qualified scholars publish significantly more papers than their non-qualified colleagues, in journals of comparable quality. Our results emphasize the importance of promotion incentives as an effective incentivizing tool in public universities and more in general public organizations.

This paper exploits a novel dataset covering the universe of transactions in the Colombian Stock Exchange to analyze episodes of additions to and deletions from MSCI equity indexes. The analysis finds that additions and deletions have large price effects: the median cumulative abnormal return in absolute value is 5.5 percent. The paper shows that these price effects are due to large demand shocks by different classes of international investors—not only passive funds and ETFs, but also active mutual funds, pension funds and government funds—which are not absorbed by arbitrageurs. Consistent with recent asset pricing models with limits to arbitrage, stock demand curves are estimated to be very inelastic: the demand elasticity for the median stock in the sample is −0.34, implying that a 1 percent increase in the demand for the stock increases its price by 2.9 percent.

We study the effects of sovereign debt inflows on domestic firms. To do so, we exploit episodes of large sovereign debt inflows, which follow the announcements of the inclusion of six emerging countries into major sovereign debt indexes. We find that these events reduce government bond yields, appreciate the domestic currency, and have heterogeneous stock-market effects on domestic firms. Firms operating in tradable industries experience lower returns than firms in non-tradable industries. In addition, financial firms, government-related firms, and firms that rely more on external financing experience higher returns. The effect on financial and government-related firms is stronger in countries that display larger reductions in government bond yields. The effect on tradable firms is stronger in countries that display stronger appreciations. We provide a stylized model that rationalizes these results. Our findings shed novel light on the channels through which sovereign debt inflows affect firms in emerging countries. ; Pandolfiand Williams acknowledge support from the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (2017 EIEF research grant) and the Columbian College Facilitating Fund from George Washington University. Broner and Martin acknowledge support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness through the I + D Excelencia grant (ECO2016–79823-P), the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centers of Excellence in R&D grant (CEX2019–000915-S), the Generalitat de Catalunya (AGAUR grant 2017-SGR0–1393), the CERCA Programme/Generalitat de Catalunya, and the Barcelona GSE Research Network. Martin also acknowledges support from the European Research Council under EU Seventh Frame-work Programme (FP7/2007–2013) ERC Consolidator Grant (615651-MacroColl).

This paper analyzes the effects on firms of sovereign debt inflows in emerging countries. To deal with the endogeneity between capital inflows and economic activity, we focus on capital inflows driven by countries inclusions into well-known local currency sovereign debt market indexes. These events convey little information about the future economic prospects of countries but induce large capital flows from institutional investors tracking the indexes. We show that inclusion-driven flows significantly reduce government bond yields and appreciate the domestic currency. In turn, these flows have heterogenous impact on firms stock market returns. Government related firms, financial firms and firms with larger financial constraints experience positive abnormal returns following the announcement of these events. Instead, companies operating in export-intensive sectors have negative abnormal returns. Our findings shed novel light on the channels through which capital inflows to sovereign debt markets affect firms in the economy.