When accidental bequests signal otherwise unobservable individual characteristics such as productivity and longevity, the tax administration should partition the population into two groups: One consisting of people who do not receive an inheritance and the other of those who do. The first tagged...

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...

This paper examines if an energy price shock should be compensated by a reduction in energy taxes to mitigate its impact on consumer prices. Such an adjustment is often debated and advocated for redistributive reasons. Our investigation is based on a model that characterizes second-best optimal...

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 how the risk of divorce a¤ects the human capital decisions of a young couple. We consider a setting where complete specialization (one of the spouses uses up all the education resources) is optimal with no divorce risk. Symmetry in education (both spouses receive an equal...

This paper studies the determination of informal long-term care (family aid) to de- pendent elderly in a worst case scenario concerning the harmonyof family relations. Children are purely sel…sh, and neither side can make credible commitments (which rules out e¢ cient bargaining). The model is...

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...

We build a model where two banks compete for the patronage of consumers by offering them, among other services and products, two forms of transactional media: paper statements and electronic substitutes. Both banks and both products are horizontally di¤erentiated and modeled à la...