In a static exchange economy, when all the endowments are issued as securities on a stock exchange, Pareto optimal allocations may be reached by trading options on the market index (see Breeden and Litzenberger (1978)). We extend this result when some of the risks cannot be exchanged on the...

By buying cheap and selling dear, risk-neutral commodity speculators can smooth commodity prices and induce serial dependence in price even when none would exist under a simple process of supply and demand. Commodity prices are variable and strongly positively correlated from one year to the...

SUMMARY While using financial incentives to increase fertility has become relatively common, the effects of such policies are difficult to assess. We propose an identification strategy that relies on the fact that the variation in wages induces variation in benefits and tax credits among...

This paper combines a Phillips curve and a disequilibrium model of the labor market. The novel feature of the model is that both the Phillips curve and the equation that links excess labor supply and unemployment contain lagged latent variables, which makes standard estimation methods...

The purpose of this paper is to study the causes of unemployment empirically, using individual data and an approach which refines that of Meyer and Wise. Using the French 1997 Labour Survey data, we decompose non-employment of married women into three components: voluntary, classical (due to the...

There has been little empirical work evaluating the sensitivity of fertility to financial incentives at the household level. We put forward an identification strategy that relies on the fact that variation of wages induces variation in benefits and tax credits among 'comparable' households. We...