An information-theoretic thought experiment is developed to provide a methodology for predicting endowment distributions in the absence of information on agent preferences. The allocation problem is first presented as a stylised knapsack problem. Although this knapsack allocation is intractable,...

Dans la foulée du Rapport Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi, nous proposons ici de nouvelles réflexions sur le progrès social et le bien-être, qui annoncent de nouveaux travaux et de nouvelles avancées. À partir de quelques exemples simples empruntés à l'actualité, nous montrons d'abord comment...

By defining the Variable Output Elasticities Cobb-Douglas function, this article shows that a large class of production functions can be approximated by a Cobb-Douglas function with nonconstant output elasticity. Compared to standard flexible functions such as the Translog function, this...

The highly politicized debate about the recent Alternative Investment Fund Manager (AIFM) Directive of the European Union led many observers to suspect an ideological battle between countries seeking to impose transnational regulation on financial service industries such as hedge funds and...

The maximum entropy methodology is applied to the Schelling model of urban segregation in order to obtain a reliable prediction of the stable configuration of the system without resorting to numerical simulations. We show that this approach also provides an implicit equation describing the...

Arguing that total consumer wealth is unobservable, we invert the (approximate) consumption function to reconstruct, in a world with Kreps-Porteus generalized isoelastic preferences, i) the wealth that supports the agents’ observed consumption as an optimal outcome and ii) the rate of return...

We build a theoretical model of multi-product firms that highlights how market size and ge- ography (the market sizes of and bilateral economic distances to trading partners) affect both a firm's exported product range and its exported product mix across market destinations (the dis- tribution...

Il existe une économie politique du redoublement dont il faut essayer de mettre à jour quelques ressorts : le redoublement est une modalité particulière de la gestion du système éducatif qui présente des coûts et des bénéfices et dont l’efficacité est mise en question depuis de...

Though a large literature on the determinants of turnout has ourished, there is scant evidence on the causal impact of turnout on policies implemented in practice. Using data on French municipalities and instrumental variables for turnout based on temperature and inuenza variations, we show that...

Après avoir illustré comment la science économique envisage l'enjeu spatial, on analyse l'innovation majeure apportée par la globalisation : là où le commerce international se heurtait à un « effet-frontière » relativement identifiable et linéaire (un tarif douanier), il est avant...