This paper studies the optimal direct/indirect tax mix in a setting where individuals differ in several unobservable characteristics (productivity and endowments). Tax instruments (income and commodity taxes) are constrained solely by the information structure.

The shares of the public sector in health insurance provision varies enormously from country to country. It is larger in more redistributive countries. We provide a possible theoretical explanation for these facts: a public health insurance system, financed by taxes, can be an efficient means of...

Par un modele aussi simple que possible, nous essayons de capturer les raisons pour lesquelles plus de 40 millions d'Americains (Hellander et al., 1995) renoncent a s'assurer contre la maladie. Nous utilisons ensuite notre modele pour evaluer les effets qu'aurait eue l'introduction , prevue dans...

We study how optimal contracts are modified when the agent has the possibility to acquire information before the contract is offered to him. We consider a situation in which this information is always available to the agent just before producing. Therefore, prior information acquisition is...

In a Baron-Myerson setup, we study a situation where an agent is initially uninformed, but can, at a cost, acquire information about the state of nature before the principal offers him a contract. For intermediate values of the cost of acquiring information, the agent's equilibrium strategy will...

This paper extends the Atkinson-Stiglitz model of direct and indirect taxation to a dynamic setting with two unobservable characteristics: productive ability and inherited wealth.Bequests are motivated by the "joy of giving".