There is a capital taxation puzzle in most developed countries. Since the 1960s, revenues from wealth transfer taxation have been especially low and decreasing as a percentage of GDP, even to the extent of disappearing in quite a number of cases; by contrast, lifetime wealth or capital taxation...

Measuring individual preferences of savers have two main motivations: to reduce the share of non-observed heterogeneity in explaining households' wealth behaviors, and to construct more accurate tests of the theories of savings and portfolio choices. For France, we have constructed a unique data...

For a sub-sample of French households of an Insee wealth survey, we obtain new and relative measures of 5 individual preference parameters : the risk "attitude" (aversion, prudence...), the rate of time depreciation over the life-cycle, the degree of short-term impatience, and the degrees of...

In an extended variant of the life-cycle hypothesis, saving behaviour is shown to depend crucially on the interaction between two preference parameters : γ, which represents risk attitudes (aversion, prudence...), and δ, the rate of time depreciation. Hence, the predictions of four specific...

In a series of experiments conducted in Belgium (Wallonia and Flanders), France and the Netherlands, we compare behavior regarding tax evasion and welfare dodging, with and without information about others' behavior. Subjects have to decide between a "registered" income, the realization of which...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the alternative explanatory factors of the so-called long term care insurance puzzle, namely the fact that so few people purchase a long term care insurance whereas this would seem to be a rational conduct given the high probability of dependence and the...

Income-differentiated mortality, by reducing the share of poor persons in the population, leads to what can be called the "Mortality Paradox": the worse the survival conditions of the poor are, the lower the measured poverty is. We show that the extent to which FGT measures (Foster Greer...

Under income-differentiated mortality, poverty measures reflect not only the "true" poverty, but, also, the interferences or noise caused by the survival process at work. Such interferences lead to the Mortality Paradox: the worse the survival conditions of the poor are, the lower the measured...

A premature death unexpectedly brings a life and a career to their end, leading to substantial welfare losses. We study the retirement decision in an economy with risky lifetime, and compare the laissez-faire with egalitarian social optima. We consider two social objectives: (1) the maximin on...

We explore the optimal fertility age-pattern in a four-period OLG economy with physical capital accumulation. For that purpose, we .rstly compare the dynamics of two closed economies, Early and Late Islands, which di¤er only in the timing of births. On Early Island, children are born from...