We analyse the optimal Initial Public Offering (IPO) mechanism in a multidimensional adverse selection setting where institutional investors have private information about the market valuation of the shares, the intermediary has private information about the demand, and the institutional...

The canonical selection contracting programme takes the agent's participation decision as deterministic and finds the optimal contract, typically satisfying this constraint for the worst type. Upon weakening this assumption of known reservation values by introducing independent randomness into...

This paper studies the optimal direct/indirect tax mix in a setting where individuals differ in several unobservable characteristics (productivity and endowments). Tax instruments (income and commodity taxes) are constrained solely by the information structure. It presents general expressions...

This paper extends the Atkinson-Stiglitz model of direct and indirect taxation to a dynamic setting with two unobservable characteristics: productive ability and inherited wealth. Bequests are motivated by the "joy of giving". A child's inheritance is a random variable with a probability...

There is no consensus among health economists about the specification of individual preferences that best fits observed behaviors. One crucial point of disagreement concerns the sign of the interaction between health and wealth in individual utility functions. We propose here a simple, static,...

The paper investigates, in a non-technical fashion, the economic determinants of interchange fees in payment card systems and the potential need for their regulation. Among other things, it demonstrates that the proposal for a cost-based regulation of interchange fees relies on an erroneous,...

A number of empirical studies seem to reject the additive separability of preferences that is assumed in most theoretical models of the life cycle. We show that, when additive separability is abandoned and interactions between consumptions at different dates are taken into account, an...

The classical Bagehot conception of a Lender of Last Resort (LOLR) that lends to illiquid banks has been criticized on two grounds: On the one hand, the distinction between insolvency and illiquidity is not clear-cut; on the other, a fully collateralized repo market allows central banks to...