This article offers some economic insights for the debate on the reversible geological disposal of radioactive waste. Irreversibility due to large sunk costs, an important degree of fiexibility and several sources of uncertainty are taken into account in the decision process relative to the...

In this paper we discuss different aspects of long memory behaviorand applicable parametric models. We discuss the confusion thatcan arise when the empirical autocorrelation function decreasesin an hyperbolic way.

We characterize the set of second-best optimal "menus" of student-loan contracts in a simple economy with risky labour-market outcomes, adverse selection, moral hazard and risk aversion. The model combines student loans with an elementary optimal income-tax problem. The second-best optima...

We introduce a two-period general equilibrium model with uncertainty and incomplete financial markets, where default is allowed and agents face in case they do default an utility penalty, which is their own private information. In this setting, if agents have heterogeneous characteristics they...

We study the consequences of dropping the perfect competition assumption in a standard infinite horizon model with infinitely-lived traders and real collateralized assets, together with one additional ingredient : information among players is asymmetric and monitoring is incomplete. The key...

This paper applies to adverse selection theory the advances made in the field of ambiguity theory. It shows that i) a relevant second-best contract induces no production distortion considering the efficient agent as in the standard case. But the principal has to pay a higher information rent...

This paper presents a general framework for modeling the impact of insurance on healthcare demand extending some of the results of the two-risk model of Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976), but including the latter as a special case. Rothschild and Stiglitz's approach assumes equivalence between the...

This paper provides an analysis of the health insurance and health care consumption. A structural microeconomic model of joint demand for health insurance and health care is developed and estimated using full maximum likelihood method using Swiss insurance claims data for over 60 000 adult...

This paper is a first attempt to connect the heterogeneity in bank efficiency with lending fluctuations and allocation efficiency: there is a trade-off between the two in the presence of heterogeneity in bank monitoring efficiency. The mechanism at hand is twofold. (a) First the rent extracted...