This paper uses French food-expenditure data to examine the effect of the local prices of 23 food product categories on the distribution of Body Mass Index (BMI) in a sample of French adults. A dynamic choice model using standard assumptions in Physiology is developed. It is shown that the slope...

We examine the importance of production risks in agriculture due to biotic elements such as pests in determining the pattern of trade and the distribution of prices in a Ricardian two-country setup. These elements create biodiversity eff ects that result in an incomplete specialization at the...

Production risks in agriculture due to biotic elements such as pests create biodiversity effects that impede productivity. Pesticides reduce these effects but are damaging for the environment and human health. When regulating farming practices, governments weigh these side-effects against the...

The two episodes of food price surges in 2007 and 2011 have been particularly challenging for developing and emerging economies' central banks and have raised the question of how monetary authorities should react to such external relative price shocks. We develop a new-keynesian small...

En Brasil, el bioetanol, juntamente con el bagazo de la caña, representa el 18,1% de la oferta interna de energía, lo que lo califica como la segunda mayor fuente de energía en una matriz energética compuesta por un 45% de energías renovables, mientras que la media mundial llega al 14%. Se...

A vast recent literature has stressed social fragmentation's negative impact on the provision of public goods. This is a key issue, given that public goods availability has been reckoned as crucial to economic development, while developing countries' societies often exhibit high degrees of...

This paper discusses how the economic structure and asset ownership shape economic and political outcomes. Using a simple model of the productive sector, I provide theoretical evidence that complementarities between productive assets reduce the stakes of political competition, and therefore...

An unfunded Social Security system faces the major risk, sometimes referred to as "political risk", that future generations modify or even suppress the contributions. In order to account properly for this risk, the paper considers a political process in which the support to the system is asked...

This paper analyses the French political crisis since the late 1970s by investigating the links between the social structure and the economic policy expectations of the electorate. To this end, data on post-electoral survey are used to estimate structural models of political support to political...

Degressivity of unemployment benefits is a major feature of social protection in most industrialised countries: the replacement rate (the ratio between the level of welfare benefits and the previous income) typically declines with the length of the unemployment spell. Moreover degressivity of...