We examine in this paper the effect of an early resolution of uncertainty on savings. We show that this effect is in general ambiguous. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions on the utility function which guarantee that an early resolution of uncertainty reduces current savings for...

This paper shows how the instruments of incentive theory can be used to develop some views about the proper design of governments to avoid the capture of politicians and bureaucrats by interest groups.

We consider a model in which the agent faces two independant risks of losswith different probabilities of occurence and (possibly) different levels of potential loss. We show that it is optimal to select a deductable for the low probability event that is not larger than the optimal deductable...

The GARCH and Stochastic Volatility paradigms are often brought into conflict as two competitive views of the appropriate conditional variance concept: conditional variance given past values of the same series or conditional variance given a larger past information (including possibly...

This paper synthesize different econometric models of the postal delivery, estimated using a french data set. These models explain the demand of labor (representing the essential part of the cost) by a vector of outputs (different types of delivered objects) and by geographical characteristics...

The paper discusses how conflicts between the multiple objectives of policymakers (efficiency, equity, fiscal, speed of reform, signaling...) can influence the optimal design of concessions contracts for network services in infrastructure. The discussion covers the relevance of information...

This paper aims at measuring the loss in the value of a firm due to the gamble for resurrection, in a standard contingent claims model. Just before a debt repayment is due, the equityholders of a levered firm can decide to shut the firm down or to keep it as an ongoing concern. We study how...