In this paper, we formulate and estimate an economic model of labor supply and welfare participation. The model is estimated on data on single men from Quebec drawn from the 1986 Canadian Census. Budget sets for each work-welfare combination - accounting for income taxes, tax credits and welfare...

We consider a pure exchange representative agent economy with perishable and durable commodities in which the durable good provides status as well as services. We examine the effects of the durable's attributes on demands and equilibrium prices. When the attributes are perfect substitutes...

This paper proposes a general way to craft public policy when there is no consensual account of the situation of interest. The design builds on a dual extension of the traditional theory of economic policy. It does not require a representative policymaker's utility function (as in the literature...

We examine intertemporal asset pricing when short sales are constrained in proportion to the value of an investor's portfolio. All assets' prices exceed every investor's marginal utility of consumption-based valuation of the associated dividends if every investor finds himself constrained in...

This paper proposes a formal definition of the notion of technological paradigm. This definition is consistent with the fundamental proposition of Kuhnian philosophy of science, that progress only happens through successive and abrupt shifts of paradigm. It also helps clarifying a number of...

We make use of experimental economics to examine how people adjust their supply of work effort in response to a variation in tax rates. Participants are paired in the experiment. In each pair, one participant randomly chosen has to exert an effort and is taxed to the benefit of the other...

This experiment evaluates various systems of taxation on the number of real tasks performed by participants and in terms of fiscal income generated to help government in its redistributive goal. The first treatment concerns a proportional system of taxation. The second treatment considers an...

When a deficit occurs in the funding of collective goods, it is usually covered by raising the amount of taxes or by rationing the supply of the goods. This article compares the efficiency of these institutions. We report the results of a 2x2 experiment based on a game in the first stage of...

A conjecture of Laffer, which had considerable influence on fiscal doctrine, is that tax revenues of a Leviathan state eventually decrease when the tax rate exceeds a threshold value. We conduct a real effort experiment, in which a worker is matched with a non-working partner, to elicit the...

In order to choose the proper size of an infrastructure and to save as much as possible on investment costs, it is necessary for the responsible party (the Centre in the language of this report) to have access to information that is typically known only by some agents or partners who may use...