In their book Climate Change Justice, Eric Posner and David Weisbach advocate adoption of an economically optimal climate treaty coupled with foreign aid (to handle distributional issues with poor countries) and increased investment (to transfer funds to future generations harmed by climate...

The European Commission appears determined to take action in order to harmonize contract law in the European Union. Most recently, it has issued a Green Paper on 1 July 2010. In order to aid the process of harmonization, a large-scale academic study had been commissioned, the 'Draft Common Frame...

Human development is meant to be transformational in that it aims to improve people’s lives by enhancing their capabilities. But who does it target: people as they are or the people they will become? This paper argues that the human development approach relies on an understanding of personal...

The axiom translation invariance consists in asserting the invariance of the ranking of two utility streams if one applies the same translation to both. This axiom is significant in the characterization of utilitarian criteria in finite dimension. This characterization is achieved thanks to the...

The axiom translation invariance consists in asserting the invariance of the ranking of two utility streams if one applies the same translation to both. This axiom is significant in the characterization of utilitarian criteria in finite dimension. This characterization is achieved thanks to the...

I provide a selective review of discounting and climate policy. After reviewing evidence on the importance of the discount rate in setting policy, I ask whether standard models tend to exaggerate the sacrifices that the current generation needs to undertake in order to internalize climate...

We study the role of alternative intertemporal preference representations in a model of economic growth, stock pollutant and endogenous risk of catastrophic collapse. We contrast the traditional “discounted utility” model, which assumes risk neutrality with respect to intertemporal utility,...

This paper examines the economic origins of the Islamic revival that took place in Egypt in the 1970-80s, and in Muslim societies more generally. We provide the first systematic evidence of a decline in social mobility among educated youth in Egypt. Developing a behavioral model of religion, we...

I propose two new tests of Falk and Knell's (2004)prediction that individuals'reference income increases with ability. To overcome the difficulty that the reference income is not observed in existing large data sets, I extend Falk and Knell's model to establish a link between immigrants'...

This paper asks whether the gap in subjective happiness between spouses matters per se, i.e. whether it predicts divorce. We use three panel databases to explore this question. Controlling for the level of life satisfaction of spouses, we find that a higher satisfaction gap, even in the first...