We develop a theoretical analysis of two widely used regulations of genetic tests, disclosure duty and consent law, and we run several experiments in order to shed light on both the take-up rate of genetic testing and on the comparison of policyholders' welfare under the two regulations....

We compare two genetic testing regulations, Disclosure Duty (DD) and Consent Law (CL), in an environment where individuals choose to take a genetic test or not. DD forces agents to reveal the test results to their insurers, resulting in a discrimination risk. CL allows agents to withhold that...

We study a situation where physicians differing in their degree of altruism exert a diagnostic effort before deciding whether to test patients to determine the most appropriate treatment. The diagnostic effort generates an imperfect private signal of the patient’s type, while the test is...

This paper shows that the design of education policy involves a potential conflict between welfare and social mobility. We consider a setting in which social mobility is maximized under the least elitist public education system, whereas welfare maximization calls for the most elitist system. We...

We build a model of secession crises where voters may wish to accommodate the minority to prevent secession. We show the existence of a majority voting equilibrium with a government's type biased in favor of the minority. We propose a measure of secession risk and perform the comparative static...

We study the political determination of the level of social long-term care insurance when voters also choose private insurance and saving amounts. Agents differ in income, probability of becoming dependent and of receiving family help. Social insurance redistributes across income and risk...

We study how rich shareholders can use their economic power to deregulate firms that they own, thus skewing the income distribution towards themselves. Agents differ in productivity and choose how much labor to supply. High productivity agents also own shares in the productive sector and thus...

We build a political economy model where individuals differ in the extent of the behavioral bias they exhibit when voting first over social long-term care (LTC) insurance and then choosing the amount of LTC annuities. LTC annuities provide a larger return if dependent than if healthy. We study...

We show that a transfer targeting a minority of the population is sustained by majority voting, however small the minority targeted, when the probability to receive the transfer is decreasing and concave in income. We apply our framework to the French social housing program and obtain that...

We calibrate a sequence of four nested models to study the dynamics of wealth accumulation. Individuals maximize a utility function whose arguments are consumption and investment. They desire to accumulate wealth for its own sake - this is not a life-cycle model. A competitive firm produces a...