We experimentally test whether risk aversion or ambiguity aversion can explain decisions in a learning-by-doing game. We first measure subjects' preferences toward risk and ambiguity, and then use these measures to predict behavior in the game. We find that ambiguity averse subjects pay more...

The explanation of social inequalities in education is still a debated issue in economics. Recent empirical studies tend to downplay the potential role of credit constraint. This article tests a different potential explanation of social inequalities in education, specifically that social...

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...

There is a large literature on the optimal order of exploitation of natural resources. We explore the impact of specific technical progress that enables the saving of resource inputs in production on the order of exploitation. Models of growth tend to assume uniform and global technical progess....

We study the optimal policies of research and development in the context of a resource-exploiting economy. We distinguish two cases: non-renewable resources and renewable resources. In the first case, we show that it is useful to construct an index of scarcity, which is the product of the level...

A large number of our daily activities are routinized in the sense that they are done without explicit deliberation. We provide a first model that captures this phenomenon. In a dynamic setting routines arise endogenously from the necessity to economize on time and attention. Routines are shown...

This paper distinguishes relative risk aversion and resistance to intertemporal substitution in climate risk modeling. Stochastic recursive preferences are introduced in a stylized numeric climate-economy model using preliminary IPCC 1998 scenarios. It shows that higher risk aversion increases...

We assess the predictive accuracy of a large number of multivariate volatility models in terms of pricing options on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. We measure the value of model sophistication in terms of dollar losses by considering a set 248 multivariate models that differ in their...

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...

Twenty years ago, the French created a so far unique insurance scheme to cover damages due to natural catastrophes. This so-called ''Cat-Nat system'' combines private insurance industry, a state-guaranteed public reinsurance and the Treasury. We provide a simple game-theoretic model which seems...