The paper identifies a necessary and sufficient condition for a deterministic local optimum to be locally improved upon by a stochastic deviation. When this condition is satisfied, a method to construct the stochastic allocations that increase the objective is provided. This technique is applied...

This note shows that there are close connections between the determinacy of a stationary state equilibrium and its stability under learning whenever agents try to estimate both the law of motion of the state variable and the stationary state value.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the relevance of rational expectations solutions to the class of linear univariate models where both the number of leads in expectations and the number of lags in predetermined variables are arbitrary. It recommends to rule out all the solutions that would...

Ce texte étudie les effets d'une réforme consistant à substituer la TVA, une taxe assise principalement sur la consommation finale des ménages, à des cotisations sociales, assises sur les salaires. Il discute les conditions sous lesquelles une telle mesure n'est pas neutre pour l'économie...

This paper examines a symmetric Nash equilibria of a two-country model of fiscal competition with a continuum of taxable commodities in each country. The innovation is to impose a uniformity restriction that there can be only two rates of tax on the different commodities, a positive rate and the...

This paper studies relationships between the local determinacy of a stationary equilibrium in the perfect foresight dynamics, and its local stability in dynamics arising from econometric learning procedures. Attention is focused on linear scalar economies where agents forecast only one period...

A government agency delegates to a provider (hospital, medical gatekeeper, school, social worker) the decision to supply a service or treatment to individual recipients. The agency does not perfectly know the distribution of individual treatment costs in the population. The single-crossing...

This note characterizes the optimal base for commodity taxation in the presence of administrative fixed costs varying across goods. For low tax rates, the optimal base only comprises commodities whose discouragement index is greater than the ratio of their administrative costs to the tax they...

An optimal contract may involve randomization when the agents differ in their attitudes towards risk, so that randomization enables the principal to relax the incentive constraints. The paper provides a necessary and sufficient condition for local random deviations to be welfare improving in a...

This note characterizes the optimal base for commodity taxation in the presence of administrative fixed costs varying across goods. For low tax rates, the optimal base comprises all commodities whose discouragement index is greater than the ratio of their administrative costs to the tax they yield.