We characterize how public insurance schemes are constrained by hidden financialtransactions. When non-exclusive private insurance entails increasing unit transaction costs,public transfers are only partly offset by hidden private transactions, and can influenceconsumption allocation. We show...

This paper studies the impact of product and labor market regulations on informality andunemployment in a general framework where formal and informal firms are subject to thesame externalities, differing only with respect to some parameter values. Both formal andinformal firms have monopoly...

The main purpose of this paper is to estimate the size and the growth of Quebec’sunderground economy, and the corresponding loss of taxes for the government. Ourapproach is based on a method developed by Pissarides and Weber (1989) and extended byLyssiotou et al. (2004). The basic hypothesis...

Drawing on Baumol’s concepts of productive, unproductive and destructiveentrepreneurship and relevant amendments, this thesis aims to contribute to theentrepreneurship literature by developing a conceptual framework which allowsoperationalising the concepts for empirical assessment....

Defined-contribution plans represent a major organizational form for investors´ retirement savings. Today more than one third of all workers are enrolled in 401K plans.(...)

In this paper, I present a theory of dynamic economic growth, business cycles, and asset pricing that integrates (1) Marx's idea (and emphasized by Klein) of a two-class heterogeneity of the ownership structure of physical capital and human capital in a capitalist society, (2) Keynes' idea of...

The large spread between equity returns and risk free rates observed in most stock markets (the "equity premium puzzle") has been subject of intense debates. Two main families of models claim to solve this puzzle: habit formation models and loss aversion models. The goal of this paper is to...

This paper studies the Cass-Koopmans-Ramsey model of optimal economic growth with a representative agent whose preferences for consumption can be gradually varied between the standard CES case and Kahneman and Tversky's prospect utility. The numerical analysis of a specific parametrization shows...

Prospect theory has found an increasing attention in many fields of economics. However, it has scarcely been addressed in a macroeconomic growth model. In an earlier paper we introduced prospect theory into a stochastic growth model. This paper focuses on linking the Euler equation induced by...

We compare the optimal capital stock accumulation in a classical Ramsey model with production shocks for a risk neutral expected utility maximizer and a loss averse prospect theory maximizer. It is shown that in the expected utility case the capital stock is on average the same as in the...