A retrospective analysis of European integration shows how political factors and economic opportunities/constraints have interacted in the progressive design of an unprecedented form of federalism. Political reconciliation of former enemies (France and Germany), modesty of the first steps of...

Finding solutions to the Bellman equation relies on restrictive boundedness assumptions. The literature on endogenous growth or business cycle models with unbounded random shocks provide with numerous examples of recursive programs in which returns are not bounded along feasible paths. In this...

It is often argued that the tax on continued work should be removed by implementing actuarially fair schemes. However, these schemes cannot help finance the expected Social Security deficit. This paper proposes to give individuals on a fraction of the marginal actuarially fair incentives in case...

This paper addresses the effect of horizontal mergers on prices. It is shown that if firms compete in quantities and marginal costs are nondecreasing, any profitable merger failing to generate technological synergies must harm consumers through higher prices, irrespective of entry conditions in...

This paper studies the effect of credit constraints on the expansion and survival of firms in foreign markets. It develops a model of the multi-country firm, in which, lower access to external finance, or reduced internal liquidity, hampers the firm ability to finance the recurrent costs to...

Using department level administrative data from 1826 to 1936 we document the evolution of crime rates in 19th century France and we estimate the impact of a negative income shock on crime. Our identification strategy exploits the phylloxera crisis. Between 1863 and 1890, phylloxera destroyed...

We study compensation packages in family and non-family firms. Using French matched employer-employee data, we first show that family firms pay on average lower wages. We find that part of this wage gap is due to low wage workers sorting into family firms and high wage workers sorting into...

This paper develops a method to measure difficulties in market access over a large set of countries (both developing and developed) and industries, during the period 1980-2006. We use a micro-founded heterogeneous-consumers model to estimate the impact of national borders on global and regional...