Past experiences and social forces have been incorporated into tastes in order to analyze various microeconomic issues. We use these extended preferences to model the making of standard-of-living aspirations and study their effect on macroeconomic variables. We concentrate first on consumption...

We extend the benchmark RBC model amending the technology for efficiency wage considerations. The disutility of effort depends on current, alternative and past wages. Past wages are treated as the worker's past wages (personal norm case) or as the past wages of the society (social norm case)....

We present an efficiency wage model in which workers' effort depends on the level and on the growth rate of their wage relative to an alternative wage. Using data for four countries (US, UK, FR, GY), the implications of the model are examined and are found to be in accordance with the...

We present a dynamic non-linear model for an efficient contracting between a firm facing adjustment costs on labour and a union having preferences which are subject to habit formation. The model’s first order necessary conditions are estimated for the French, the Dutch and the Belgian labour...

We address the issue of altruism when standard-of-living aspirations are transmitted from one generation to the other. In that case, the influence of altruistic parents is not limited to the bequest they could leave; indeed, they direct the evolution of children's aspirations toward raising their...

If children inherit life standard aspirations from their parents, their savings are affected and cycles may appear in OLG models with production. At some point of an expansion, aspirations grow faster than wages, savings decrease, and a contraction begins.

We present an overlapping generations model with endogenous growth in which children inherit from the previous generation human capital and life standard aspirations. Adults evaluate their own consumption with respect to a baseline requirement which depends on their parents past consumption. The...

We analyze the effect of a constant debt policy on capital accumulation and provide an in-depth treatment of the dynamics in the economy of Diamond. We derive the conditions for avoiding a debt crisis in both the short-run and the long-run and provide geometrical tools to analyze the issue of...

This paper studies the conditions under which an IT revolution may endogenously occur. To this end, we construct an endogenous growth multisectoral model with a preeminent IT sector. Technological progress is embodied : New softwares can only be run on the most recent generations and hardware....