Whether to keep products segregated (e.g., unbundled) or integrate some or all of them (e.g., bundle) has been a problem of profound interest in areas such as portfolio theory in finance, risk capital allocations in insurance, and marketing of consumer products. Such decisions are inherently...

We provide a necessary condition for optimal commodity taxes when agents differ according to labor skill and consumption tastes and when the government can also use a general nonlinear tax on labor income. The discouragement index of commodities in shown to be the sum of (1) the distributive...

We study the testability implications of public versus private consumption. The distinguishing feature of our approach is that we start from a revealed preference characterization of collectively rational behavior. Remarkably, we find that assumptions regarding the public or private nature of...

We introduce a new type of demand system using a feedforward artificial neural network. The neural network demand system is a flexible system that requires few hypotheses, has no roots in consumer theory but may be used to test it. We use the system to estimate demand elasticities on micro data...

A long pseudo panel is built from eight Canadian household budget surveys (1969-2008) in order to estimate demand functions on long periods. The difference between estimations is the cross-sectional and time dimensions allow the identification of non monetary constraints that influence...

This article investigates whether the formation of individual inflation expectations is biased towards a consensus and is thus subject to some kind of herding behavior. Basing on the traditional Carlson-Parkin approach to quantify qualitative survey expectations and its extension by Kaiser and...

This article investigates whether the formation of individual inflation expectations is biased towards a consensus and is thus subject to some kind of herding behavior. Basing on the traditional Carlson-Parkin approach to quantify qualitative survey expectations and its extension by Kaiser and...

This paper proposes an empirical analysis of the declining support for the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) during Schröder government's second term of office, which was marked by major reforms in the fields of unemployment insurance and labour market policy (Hartz reforms). Drawing on a...

We use the demand system approach to estimate the size of informal economy in Turkey following the methodology based on the analysis of the individual consumption behaviour proposed by Pissarides, Weber [1989], Lyssiotou et al. [2004] and Fortin et al. [2009]. We extend this method by taking...

In France, since 2001, home care for disabled elderly can be partially subsidized by a public allowance (allocation personnalisée d'autonomie - APA). For eligible elderly people, the amount to be paid for one hour of formal home care depends on their income, according to a national rule, but...