Essays on Public Economics and Fiscal Policy

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first two chapters investigate how individuals’ perceptions and beliefs shape their economic behavior and their attitudes towards public policies, using large-scale surveys and experiments. In the first chapter, I study how beliefs about search costs, returns to search effort, and outside options relate to the job mobility decisions of employed workers. In the second chapter—coauthored with Alberto Alesina and Stefanie Stantcheva—we investigate how people perceive immigrants and how these perceptions influence their support for redistribution. In the third chapter—coauthored with Alberto Alesina, Gualtiero Azzalini, Carlo Favero, and Francesco Giavazzi—we study the effects on output of fiscal adjustments as a function of the composition of the adjustment—whether the adjustment is mostly based on spending cuts or on tax hikes—and of the state of the business cycle when the adjustment is implemented.