Complicated neoclassical models predict that if investment is sensitive to current financial performance, this is a sign that something is "wrong" and is to be regarded as a problem for policy. Evolutionary theory, on the other hand, refers to the principle of "growth of the fitter" to explain...

This paper focuses on the link between the economic conceptions of rationality and learning. Traditionally, most economists believe that learning is just a way for agents to become fully rational. But being fully rational cannot describe a process, for there is only one way to be rational in the...

Gabriel Tarde was a French sociologist and criminologist whose work is rediscovered from time to time. Economists of innovation have paid insufficient attention to an author who devoted a large part of his work to the laws of imitation and invention. The purpose of this paper is threefold. The...

Inequality in land ownership remains a major issue in many developing countries, such as Brazil, Colombia, and South Africa. Donors advocate a new model of "willing-buyer/willing-seller\", market-led land redistribution, but actual redistribution has fallen short of expectations. Little effort...

This paper presents evidence from three French VAT reforms showing that tax shifting on prices operates differently upwards and downwards. This may appear as a paradox when reading usual studies on price shifting. This paper puts forward two different asymmetric effects. The first one is linked...

The point of this paper is to measure empirically the distribution of the commodity tax burden between consumers and producers. For that purpose, two French reforms are studied. These reforms are steep decreases of the VAT rate on housing repair services on the one hand, and on new car sales on...

We consider an oligopolistic industry including leveraged firms and unleveraged ones where firms are engaged in a sequential decision-making process. At the first stage of the game, a firm and her bank, considering the demand uncertainty and the distribution probability of the shock, evaluate a...