We present the Fair Social Ordering approach to policy assessment. In an economic model, a Social Ordering Function (SOF) associates each economy in the domain with a complete ranking of the allocations. We describe the main achievements of the SOF theory. We present two applications, which show...

We study the macroeconomic effects of systemic bank runs in a neoclassical model with a microfounded banking system. In every period, the banks provide insurance against some idiosyncratic liquidity shocks, but the possibility of sunspot-driven bank runs distorts the equilibrium allocation. In a...

We solve two related extremal problems in the theory of permutations. A set Q of permutations of the integers 1 to n is inversion-complete (resp., pair-complete) if for every inversion (j, i), where 1 <= i < j <= n, (resp., for every pair (i, j), where i not= j) there exists a permutation in Q where j is before i. It is minimally inversion-complete if in addition no proper subset of Q is inversion-complete; and similarly for paircompleteness. The problems we consider are to determine the maximum cardinality of a minimal inversion-complete set of permutations, and that of a minimal pair-complete set of permutations. The latter problem arises in the determination of the Carathéodory numbers for certain abstract convexity structures on the (n - 1)-dimensional real and integer vector spaces. Using Mantel's Theorem on the maximum number of edges in a triangle-free graph, we determine these two maximum cardinalities and we present a complete description of the optimal sets of permutations for each problem. Perhaps surprisingly (since there are twice as many pairs to cover as inversions), these two maximum cardinalities coincide whenever n >= 4.

Judgment (or logical) aggregation theory is logically more powerful than social choice theory and has been put to use to recover some classic results of this field. Whether it could also enrich it with genuinely new results is still controversial. To support a positive answer, we prove a social...

The paper is devoted to an econometric analysis of learning foreign languages in all parts of the world. Our sample covers 193 countries and 13 important languages. Four factors significantly explain learning. All four affect the broad decision to learn but the last two also point to the choice...

The rising level of long-term care (LTC) expenditures and their financing sources are likely to impact savings and capital accumulation and henceforth the pattern of growth. This paper studies how the joint interaction of the family, the market and the State influences capital accumulation in a...

La publication tous les trois ans des enquêtes PISA1 offre un cadre d’analyse plus qu’intéressant en matière de politiques éducatives. Alors que les résultats de l’enquête PISA 2012 sont disponibles depuis décembre 2013, il convient de revenir sur les principaux enseignements que...

This paper highlights the empirical interaction between solvency and liquidity risks of banks that make them particularly vulnerable to an aggregate crisis. I find that banks lose their access to short-term funding when markets expect they will be insolvent in a crisis. Conversely, the expected...

The impact that output has on future total factor productivity —i.e. the dynamic complementarities shown to be empirically relevant in Cooper and Johri (1997)— is not internalized by competitive agents. As a result, the allocation that a planner would choose cannot be reached as a...

In a game with positive externalities, such as e.g. the standard environmental externality game used in the analysis of international environmental agreements, the solutions having the property of coalitional internal stability, when they exist, are compared in this paper with the solutions with...