In this paper we analyze the impact of benefits on the length of welfare spells. It introduces a ``natural experiment'' approach of comparing the length of welfare spells before and after a major reform of the welfare program that took place in the Province of Québec in August 1989. An...

In this paper, I consider the problem of designing an optimal screening contract for a principal facing an agent whose type comes as a sequence that unfolds through time. Formally, the agent has a private ex ante type that stands for the expected value of his private ex post type. Under full...

The Serial Cost Sharing Rule was originally conceived for situations where the demands of agents pertain to a homogeneous private good, produced by an unreplicable technology. In this context, it is endowed with a variety of desirable equity and coherency properties. This paper investigates the...

Despite the lack of explicit formulas for the equilibrium of the first price auction in the general asymmetric setting, we obtain explicit expressions for the first order changes due to arbitrary deviations from the symmetric setting. From these expressions, we derive results of comparative...

This paper studies the implications for international portfolio diversification of a simple OLG model of the world economy with transaction costs. Our main result shows that the introduction of very small transaction costs is sufficient to reproduce the large home bias observed in the...

In this paper, we develop a growth model in which human being is a production factor which can be combined with a fixed factor, say land, to produce a homogeneous commodity. Saving, so to speak, can only be made through having children, the number of which is an endogenous decision to the...