In the home-care services industry, caregivers drive to visit patients scattered in a district and deliver various care services at the patient's home. We use a unique data set, with a standard panel structure, recording the hours of service and the exact number of miles traveled by each...

The purpose of this paper is to compare the cost efficiency of private and public property insurance providers in Switzerland. The most commonly used measure for this kind of exercise is the Claims / Premium ratio. We argue that this measure may give strongly biased results. We develop a simple...

The well-known Johansson-Samuelson Theorem proves that, in partial equilibrium, comprehensive income taxation with a uniform tax rate is neutral in terms of investment decisions, if fiscal depreciation allowances coincide with economic depreciation. In this article we show that this result does...

Empirically, compensation systems generate substantial effort despite weak monetary incentives. We consider reciprocal motivations as a source of incentives. We solve for the optimal contract in the basic principal-agent problem and show that reciprocal motivations and explicit performance-based...

We develop a behavioral macroeconomic model in which agents use simple but biased rules to forecast future output and inflation. This model generates endogenous waves of optimism and pessimism ("Animal Spiritsʺ) that are generated by the correlation of biased beliefs. We contrast the dynamics...

We model the optimal reaction of a public PAYG pension system to demographic shocks. We compare the ex-ante first best and second best solution of a Ramsey planner with full commitment to the outcome under simple third best rules that mimic the pension systems observed in the real world. The...

We incorporate Keeping-up-with-the-Joneses (KUJ) preferences into the Blanchard-Yaari (BY) framework and develop, using an AK technology, a model of balanced growth. In this context we investigate status preference, demographic, and pension policy shocks. We find that a higher degree of KUJ...