In this paper we analyze a long-term risk-sharing contract between two risk-averse agents facing self-enforcing constraints. We enlarge the contracting space to allow for an ex ante transfer (at the beginning of the period) before the state of nature is realized. We analyze the trade-off between...

This document offers a synthesis of the papers presented at the Conference on the Econometrics of Education: Modeling Selectivity and Outcomes, held at CIRANO, April 26 and 27, 2002. The papers serve as a pretext to draw a non exhaustive survey of the state of research in the economics of...

Six months after a student ceases being enrolled full-time in an educational institution, a loan contracted with the Canada student loans program is said to be consolidated and its repayment is expected. Many ex-students will repay their loan in total (capital and interest) within a ten-year...

The topic of this paper is public financing of university education in Quebec, which is analysed from the point of view of scarcity: even governments must submit to this reality. Our argument is built around three questions: How much should society spend? How should the burden be distributed...

This paper studies a principal-agent relationship in a contractual crime setting. Suppose an agent and a principal sign a contract stipulating some transfer of funds from one player (say the agent) to the next (the principal) contingent on the state of the world announced by the first player. In...

The purpose of the study is to collect information that can be used to design a policy to induce the poor to invest in human capital. We use laboratory experimental methodology to measure the preferences and choices of the target population of a proposed government policy. We recruited 256...

This paper focuses on the disparity between willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-accept indices in nonmarket valuation. The substitution effect makes agents value net losses higher than opportunity losses. In regard to net losses, we show that imperfect substitutability respectively induces...

We elicit subjects' willingness to pay to reduce future risk. In our experiments, subjects are given a cash endowment and a risky lottery. They report their willingness to pay to exchange the risky lottery for a safe one. Subjects play the lottery either immediately, eight weeks later, or...

Uncertainties as to future supply costs of nonrenewable natural resources, such as oil and gas, raise the issue of the choice of supply sources. In a perfectly deterministic world, an efficient use of multiple sources of supply requires that any given market exhausts the supply it can draw from...

In this experimental study we examine behavior relating to voluntary contributions to reduce expected losses associated, for example, with the occurrence of natural disasters or major industrial accidents. We ask subjects to allocate tokens between a private investment and a public investment....