We show that the celebrated Atkinson and Stiglitz (1976) result on the uniformity of the commodity tax rates when preferences are weakly separable between goods and leisure does not hold when (at least) one of the goods is produced within the household. The result is restored if preferences are...

One of the pervasive problems with means-tested public long term care (LTC) programs is their inability to prevent individuals who could a¤ord private long term services from taking advantage of public care. They often manage to elude the means-test net through strategic impoverishment. We show...

This paper studies public provision of long term care insurance in a world in which family assistance is (i) uncertain and (ii) endogenous depending on the time parents spend raising their children. Public benefits will be paid in case of disability but cannot be combined with self-insurance or...

Testosterone administration appears to make individuals less trusting, and this effect was interpreted as an adaptive adjustment of social suspicion, that improved the accuracy of trusting decisions. Here we consider another possibility, namely that testosterone increases the subjective cost of...

We show that once interfamily exchanges are considered, Becker?s rotten kids mechan- ism has some remarkable implications that have gone hitherto unnoticed. Specifically, we establish that Cornes and Silva's (1999) result of e¢fficiency in the contribution game amongst siblings extends to a...

Why do some dynasties maintain the fortune of their founders while others completely squander it in few generations? To address this question, we use a simple deterministic microfounded model based on two main elements: the “hunger for accumulation” and the “willingness to exert effort”....

What makes individuals conform or diverge after observing prosocial or selfish behavior by others? We study experimentally how social comparison (observing a peer’s behavior) interacts with identity motives for cooperation. Participants play two games. We increase the strength of the identity...

In this paper, we introduce a game-theoretical non-cooperative model of bargaining to analyse project funding in the French river basin com- mittees. After sorting out some of the main theoretical predictions, we proceed with an empirical application to the subsidy policy of French Wa- ter...

We provide an experimental test of the role of self-signaling in decisions to do- nate to charity. Our data strongly supports the theoretical prediction of a non- monotonic, hill-shaped relationship between self-confidence, proxied by the Social Potency personality trait, and prosocial behavior...

Society’s demands for individual and corporate social responsibility as an alternative response to market and distributive failures are becoming increasingly prominent. We first draw on recent developments in the “psychology and economics” of prosocial behavior to shed light on this trend,...