Before the global financial crisis, the assistance of a lender of last resort was traditionally thought to be limited to commercial banks. During the crisis, however, the Federal Reserve created a number of facilities to support brokers and dealers, money market mutual funds, the commercial...

Recent decades witnessed a trend whereby private markets retreated from financing the real economy, while, simultaneously, the real economy itself became increasingly financialized. This trend resulted in public finance becoming more important for investments in capital development, technical...

Many countries have adopted energy policies that promote biofuels as a substitute for gasoline in transportation. For instance, more than 40% of U.S. grain is now used for energy and this share is expected to rise under the current Renewable Fuels Mandate. This paper examines the distributional...

This paper analyzes the impact on a proprietary software (PS) firm's profit of the activities of an open source software (OSS) community and a piracy channel, as well as on welfare. We develop a model in which the PS firm competes by price with both producers and also selects its compatibility...

This paper evaluates the presence of heterogeneity, by household type, in the elasticity of substitution between food expenditures and time and in the goods intensity parameter in the household food and eating production functions. We use a synthetic dataset constructed by statistically matching...

We consider a sequential screening problem where, in the contracting stage, the agent has private information on both the expected value and the spread of the unit cost of production. As the principal’s marginal surplus function becomes less concave / more convex in consumption units,...

A government delegates a build-operate-transfer project to a private firm. At the contracting stage, the operating cost is unknown. The firm can increase the likelihood of facing a low cost (the good state), rather than a high cost (the bad state), by exerting costly effort when building the...

This article is an extension of former empirical studies on fiscal policy and economic stabilization in the UEMOA area (DIOP M. and DIAW A., 2014). It presents the results of the first decade of macroeconomic policies following the devaluation of the CFA franc in 1994 and the adoption of the...

This paper aims to study how Facebook use influences individual well-being. We use a survey conducted on a representative sample of 2,000 French Facebook users. Our results show that Facebook interferes with subjective well-being through its effects on friendships and self-esteem. Hence we find...

Today, countries around the world are seeking "smart" innovation-led growth, and hoping that this growth is also more "inclusive" and "sustainable" than in the past. This paper argues that such a feat requires rethinking the role of government and public policy in the economy--not only funding...