A model where a portion of the population participates in illegal activities is developed. The propensity to participate in crimes depends on the probability and the opportunity cost of being arrested. The government can influence these variables by law enforcement expenditure and by social...

The permanent income hypothesis under certainty equivalence implies that optimal consumption is more volatile than labour income, when labour income is positively autocorrelated in first differences. Empirically, certainty equivalence is rejected because observed consumption is excessively...

This paper develops and analyzes a macroeconomic model in which aggregate growth and fluctuations arise from the discovery and diffusion of new technologies; there are no exogenous aggregate shocks. The temporal behavior of aggregates is driven by individuals' efforts to innovate and/or make use...

Nombreux sont ceux qui croient que l'approche du cycle économique initiée par Lucas, Kydland et Prescott a pour objectif fondamental de doter les modèles macroéconomiques de fondements microéconomiques solides alors que l'approche IS-LM- courbe de Philipps se démarquerait par son souci et...

We show that coordination failures may be part of an explanation for the demographic differences between rich and poor countries and their differing attitudes towards the use of child labor. Our analysis is carried out within a two-period, general equilibrium model with endogenous fertility,...

The permanent income hypothesis under certainty equivalence yields a martingale consumption process. Empirically, this hypothesis is rejected because consumption is excessively sensitive to anticipated income. One approach to account for excess sensitivity is to relax certainty equivalence by...

We study the problem of deterring undesirable behavior in a moral hazard framework with risk averse individuals, noisy information and costly sanctions. We find that, if sanctions are a pure loss, a utilitarian society should use a bang-bang penalty scheme satisfying the maximum penalty...

Au début des années 1980 des nombreux pays au sud du Sahara éprouvaient de nombreuses difficultés pour faire face au quotidien. La situation économique était la suivante: énorme dette, inflation croissance négative, etc. Cet article fait l'analyse des derniers évévenements sur la...

This paper presents results from the estimation of Browning, Deaton and Irish's life-cycle household model (Econometrica 1985) with eighteen waves and 380 couples from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. A labor supply equation is estimated for both husbands and wives. We present an econometric...

We perform an empirical evaluation of the role of capacity utilization in business cycle fluctuations. We first document the relation between capacity utilization and business cycle fluctuations in historical data and then verify whether these empirical features can be explained by a dynamic...