We propose an original model of human capital investments after leaving school in which individuals di¤er in their initial human capital obtained at school, their rate of return, their costs of human capital investments and their terminal values of human capital at a fixed date in the future....

This article studies a model of coalition formation for the joint production (and finance) of public projects, in which agents may belong to multiple coalitions. We show that, if projects are divisible, there always exists a stable (secession-proof) structure, i.e., a structure in which no...

In empirical research, one commonly aims to obtain evidence in favor of re- strictions on parameters, appearing as an economic hypothesis, a consequence of economic theory, or an econometric modeling assumption. I propose a new theoret- ical framework based on the Kullback-Leibler information to...

This paper investigates the reliability of SVARs to identify the dynamic effects of news shocks. We show analytically that the dynamics implied by SVARs, using both long–run and short–run restrictions, are biased. However, the bias vanishes as long as news shocks account for most of the...

This paper studies the statistical properties of impulse response functions in structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) with a highly persistent variable as hours worked and long-run identifying restrictions. The highly persistent variable is specified as a nearly stationary persistent process....

Afluent households can respond to taxation with means that are not economically viable for the rest of the population, such as sophisticated tax plans and international tax arbitrage. This paper studies an economy in which an inequality-averse social planner faces agents who have access to a...

How to motivate academically struggling students? For those tracked in the vocational stream in France, two alternatives paths are competing: full-time vocational training and apprenticeship. Little research has been done on comparing the effectiveness of these two competing templates as ways to...

What can evolutionary biology tell us about male-female differences in preferences concerning family matters? Might mothers be more solicitous toward offspring than fathers, for example? The economics literature has documented gender differences—children benefit more from money put in the...

This work studies how the introduction of competition to the side of the market offering trading contracts affects the equilibrium investment profile in a bilateral investment game. By using a common agency framework, where contracts are not exclusive, we find that the equilibrium investment...

This paper reviews some findings by Azam and Thelen (2008, 2010, 2012) that illustrate how foreign aid is used by rich countries to purchase the services of recipient governments with a view to protect or promote their economic and political interests. In particular, these findings show that...