The explanation of social inequalities in education is still a debated issue in economics. Recent empirical studies tend to downplay the potential role of credit constraint. This article tests a different potential explanation of social inequalities in education, specifically that social...

This paper discusses the demand for the arts from a theoretical and an empirical perspectives. We suggest that the demand for the arts is price elastic and that art is a luxury good. Education, and learning experiences are also important factors affecting that demand. Ce texte traite de la...

We make use of experimental economics to examine how people adjust their supply of work effort in response to a variation in tax rates. Participants are paired in the experiment. In each pair, one participant randomly chosen has to exert an effort and is taxed to the benefit of the other...

We test the simple wealth maximization theory of quitting behavior on the German Socioeconomic Panel (1985-1993). We develop a new methodology to extract a consistent estimate of how the expected present value of one's job (including the non-pecuniary component) compares with outside...

By reporting his satisfaction with his job or any other experience, an individual does not communicate the number of utils that he feels. Instead, he expresses his posterior preference over available alternatives conditional on acquired knowledge of the past. This new interpretation of reported...

The assumption of given and known preferences and possibilities so common in economic theory stands in contradiction with the kind of unsystematic change that charaterizes many experimental and real situations. Consequently the theory misspecifies rational choice and generates many puzzles...

When a deficit occurs in the funding of collective goods, it is usually covered by raising the amount of taxes or by rationing the supply of the goods. This article compares the efficiency of these institutions. We report the results of a 2x2 experiment based on a game in the first stage of...

A conjecture of Laffer, which had considerable influence on fiscal doctrine, is that tax revenues of a Leviathan state eventually decrease when the tax rate exceeds a threshold value. We conduct a real effort experiment, in which a worker is matched with a non-working partner, to elicit the...

We provide an experimental analysis of competitive insurance markets with adverse selection. Our parameterized version of the lemons' model (Akerlof 1970) in the insurance context predicts total crowding out of low-risks when insurers offer a single full insurance contract. The therapy proposed...