We present a model of household behavior to explore the complex interactions between the decision-making process within the household and social norms. The household is viewed as two separate spheres – the female and the male – both linked by a public good and a "conjugal contract" trough...

There exists a large consensus in the economic literature and in the economic institutions about the legitimacy of policies subsidizing education. This legitimacy lies in the fact that education is a source of positive externalities. In a standard framework of endogenous fertility, the present...

There are many apparent similarities between the current political and economic situations of France and Italy. The mainstream view is that at least part of the neo-liberal strategy could be a solution to the economic problems of both variants of the European model of capitalism. However, the...

Applying regressions on a sample of 18 OECD countries from 1970 to 2009 using new indicators, we find that right-wing governments liberalize more the financial sector that left-wing governments. We show that if a left-wing government accepts to liberalize the financial sector, an increase of...

We consider the problem of finding sufficient conditions for political support of liberal, growth-enhancing policy in a quality-ladders model with heterogeneous agents differing in their endowment of wealth and skills. The policy set is two-dimensional: Agents vote for the level of...

Using fixed effects panel data models on a sample of 15 OECD countries over the period 1970-2007, this article explores the linkages between labor-market volatility, financial development and welfare state institutions. We analyze the interacted impact of financial development on the one hand...

This article analyzes the linkages between financial liberalization, labor market institutions and wage inequality for 17 OECD countries over the 1989 to 2005 period. With the help of a fixed effect model with an interacted term, one crucial contribution of this article is to analyze the...

The funding of social protection has strongly evolved in Bismarckian countries : whereas social protection used to rely on social contributions, since the 1990s most of the new expenditures have been funded through taxation, leading to a more balanced mix in the structure of social protection...

This paper proposes to study how socio-economic characteristics shape preferences in European matters. It is assumed that social groups threatened by liberalization tend to be more euro-skeptical than others. This hypothesis is tested using individual-level data from two rounds of the European...

We propose a simple quality-ladder model with heterogeneous agents differing in their skills and wealth endowment to explain the persistence of barriers to entry in new democracies. In the model agents vote for a rate of redistribution and for the level of barriers to entry, which protect the...