I study the effects of a linear tax schedule on educational decisions and welfare in a two period model where the educational decision is discrete and its return is uncertain. I find that a linear tax rate has a positive effect on the number of agents who decide to acquire higher education. This...

We analyze how sexual orientation is related to household savings using 2000 US Census data, and find that gay and lesbian couples own more retirement income than do heterosexual ones, while cohabiting heterosexuals save more than their married counterparts. In a household savings model, we...

The aim of the paper is a gender analysis of the extent to which parttime work represents an individual’s preferred labor market situation. The work includes a theoretical model that delivers some predictions about the household’s preferences over non-chosen employment states. Furthermore,...

We study whether cognitive ability explains choices in a wide variety of behavioral tasks, including riskand social preferences, by collecting evidence from almost 1,200 subjects across eight experimentalprojects. Since Frederick (2005)'s Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) has been administered to...

This paper provides a cardinal welfare measure for the allocation of a bundle of goods among a group of people. Social welfare is measured as the sum of n partial indices, one for each good, each of which consists of a function of the amount of the good availabe and its dispersion, measured by...

This paper provides a comparative analysis of some classical solutions to bankruptcy problems from an axiomatic viewpoint. These rules are the constrained equal-awards rule, the constrained equal-losses rule, the proportional rule and the Talmud rule. The purpose of this study is to facilitate...

The belief that peers' characteristics influence the behavior and outcomes of students in school has been important in shaping public policy. How peers affect individuals depends on the educational system prevailing. I analyze two different systems: tracking and mixing, and I propose several...

This paper introduces a new methodology to target direct transfers against poverty. Our method is based on observable correlates and on estimation methods that focus on the poor. Using data from Tunisia, we estimate ‘focused’ transfer schemes that improve anti-poverty targeting performances....

This paper is devoted to the study of claims problems. We identify the family of rules that satisfy strong composition down (robustness with respect to reevaluations of the estate) and consistency (robustness with respect to changes in the set of agents) together. We call to that family the...

We consider allocation problems with indivisible goods when agents’ preferences are single-peaked. Two natural procedures (up methods and temporary satisfaction methods) are proposed to solve these problems. They are constructed by using priority methods on the cartesian product of agents and...