Les prévisions occupent une place particulière dans le débat public en économie. Elles sont généralement considérées comme des prédictions, qualifiées fréquemment d’optimistes ou de pessimistes, comme si elles dépendaient de l’humeur des équipes qui les réalisent. Certes, en un...

In a dynamically efficient economy, can a government roll its debt forever and avoid the need to raise taxes? In a series of examples of economies with zero growth, this paper shows that such Ponzi games may be infeasible even when the average rate of return on bonds is negative, and may be...

We build a model of endogenous destruction with credit and labor market imperfections, represented by a matching process between financiers and entrepreneurs on one hand, and entrepreneurs and workers on the other hand. Business creation, credit opening and job destruction represent three active...

Credit market imperfections influence the labor market and aggregate economic activity. In turn, macroeconomic factors have an impact on the credit sector. To assess these effects in a tractable general-equilibrium framework, we introduce endogenous search frictions, in the spirit of Peter...

Arguing that total consumer wealth is unobservable, we invert the (approximate) consumption function to reconstruct, in a world with Kreps-Porteus generalized isoelastic preferences, i) the wealth that supports the agents’ observed consumption as an optimal outcome and ii) the rate of return...

In a world in which consumers correctly expect that both Ricardian and non-Ricardian policy regimes are possible in the future, the fiscal theory of the price level is valid, yet the price is indeterminate. This result does not rely on imposing that the initial stock of nominal bonds be strictly...

Overall, the issue of whether Europeans are lazy or Americans are crazy seems of second-order importance relative to understanding the determinants of individual behavior. Amore useful, scientific approach is to assume that underlying tastes are common to both continents, while technologies,...

This paper investigates the economics of ”blue laws” or restrictions on shop-opening hours, most commonly imposed on Sunday trading. We show that in the presence of communal leisure or ”ruinous competition” externalities, retail regulations can have real effects in a simple general...

Using time-diary data from 25 countries, we demonstrate that there is a negative relationship between real GDP per capita and the female-male difference in total work time per day—the sum of work for pay and work at home. In rich northern countries on four continents there is no difference—...

General comments • Ambitious project • It provides a quantitative characterization of optimal intergenerational risk sharing in a world in which almost everything is random (productivity, demography, longevity), and in which investment is the engine of long-run growth (Ak model). • This is...