We empirically reinvestigate the issue of excess comovement of commodity prices initially raised in Pindyck and Rotemberg (1990) and show that excess comovement, when it exists, can be related to hedging and speculative pressure in commodity futures markets. Excess comovement appears when...

We introduce public spending, financed through income taxation, in the Ramsey model with heterogeneous agents. Public spending as a source of welfare generates more complex dynamics. In contrast to previous contributions focusing on similar models but with wasteful public spending, limit cycles...

This paper adapts a framework à-la Hotelling to an urban context in order to study the impact of public housing on the level of segregation in a fixed-size city where consumers differ both in income and taste. In this city, the market allocation of the population is characterized by partial...

A well-known common agreement in decision theory is that only exponential decision makers are time consistent i.e. with the mere passage of time, future choices must not contradict the initial choice. Building on this result, a large range of works has studied time inconsistency as a direct...

Obesity spreads more easily if is not perceived negatively. This may be the case among the poor, for whom fatness can be an external sign of wealth. We estimate the direct effect of overweight on emotional well-being in Mexico, a country facing the highest obesity rate in the world. Individual...

We consider a small-open, collateral-constrained AK economy. We show that the combination of CARA preferences and uncertainty on capital inflows in such an economy generates long-term (expected) growth while the deterministic counterpart does not. In this framework, long-term growth is entirely...

This paper examines the interplay between public education expenditure and economic growth in a two-sector model. We reveal that agents' preferences for services, education and savings play a major role in the relationship between growth and public education expenditures, as long as production...

We study the impact of violent conflict on social capital, as measured by citizen participation in community groups, defined by four activity types: governance, social service, infrastructure development and risk-sharing. Combining household panel data from Indonesia with conflict event...

I consider a bivariate stationary fractional cointegration system and I propose a quasi-maximum likelihood estimator based on the Whittle analysis of the joint spectral density of the regressor and errors to estimate jointly all parameters of interest of the model: the long run coefficient and...

This paper studies the impacts and determinants of trade policy. I use data on applied tariff protection of world countries over 2001-2007 to estimate sector-level trade elasticities. I then calibrate a structural gravity model of world trade. I compute the impacts of trade agreements which were...