CREMER Helmuth

The paper incorporates tax evasion into a non-linear income taxation problem. Labor supply is endogenous and individuals are risk averse. We consider a two-group model: high wage (productivity) individuals and low wage (productivity) individuals, and study the properties of optimal auditing and taxation policies. We show that high wage individuals are never audited and that their marginal tax rate is zero. Low-wage individuals are audited with a probability that is strictly less than one. Their marginal tax rate is either positive or zero, depending on the regime to which the solution belongs. An audited taxpayer who is found to be honest receives a tax reduction. However, the other results of the article do not change if we exclude the possibility of rewarding honest taxpayers.

In this paper we study the choice of financial clauses in a license agreement when demand and/or cost are uncertain. We consider contracts with three instruments: a flat fee, a per-unit fee and an ad valorem fee. We characterize the optimal contract and determine the appropriate combination of instruments to use. Whatever the source of uncertainty, the optimal contract is based, in general, on a combination of a flat fee and a royalty. However, the source of uncertainty plays a crucial role in the choice of the type of royalty. When demand is uncertain (while cost is not), the optimal contract combines a flat fee with an ad valorem charge. In this case, it is never optimal to use a per-unit charge. When cost is random (but demand is not) a wider variety of solutions emerge. Depending on the value of the structural parameters, the contract should have a flat fee associated with one or other of the fee types, or may even use all three instruments.

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This paper studies the political sustainability of programs that are targeted towards the poor. Given that the poor to whom these programs cater do not constitute a majority, we show that for their own good it pays to let the middle class benefit from them in a random way. This approach mimics the actual institutional arrangements whereby middle-class individuals feel that they can successfully apply to the programs. We consider a two stage decision process: first a Rawlsian government chooses the probability at which the middle class is allowed to benefit from a given program. then, majority voting determines the level of benefit and the rate of contribution. At the first, constitutional stage, the government cannot commit to a specific level of taxes and benefit but anticipates that these are set by majority voting in the second stage.

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We study the design of public long-term care (LTC) insurance when the altruism of informal caregivers is uncertain. We consider non-linear policies where the LTC transfer depends on the level of informal care, which is assumed to be observable, while children's altruism is not. Our policy encompasses two policies traditionally considered in the literature: topping up policies consisting of a transfer independent of informal care, and opting out policies entailing a positive transfer only if children fail to provide care. We show that both total and informal care should increase with the children's level of altruism. This is obtained under full and asymmetric information. Public LTC transfers, on the other hand, may be non-monotonic. Under asymmetric information, public LTC transfers are lower than their full information level for the parents whose children are the least altruistic, while it is distorted upward for the highest level of altruism. This is explained by the need to provide incentives to highly altruistic children. In contrast to both topping up and opting out policies, the implementing contract is always such that social care increases with informal care.

This paper studies the design of child-care policies when redistribution matters. Traditional mothers provide some informal child care, whereas career mothers purchase full time formal care in the market. The sorting of women across career paths is endogenous and shaped by a social norm about gender roles in the family. Via this social norm traditional mothersinformal child care imposes an externality on career mothers, so that the market outcome is inefficient. Informal care is too large and the group of career mothers is too small so that inefficiency and gender inequality go hand in hand. In a first-best, full information word redistribution across couples and efficiency are separable. Redistribution is performed via lump-sum transfers and taxes which are designed to equalize utilities across all couples. The efficient allocation of child care is obtained by subsidizing formal care at a Pigouvian rate. However, in a second-best settings, we show that a trade-off between the reduction of gender inequality and redistributive considerations emerge. The optimal uniform subsidy is lower than the Pigouvianlevel. Under a nonlinear policy the first-best Pigouvianrule for the (marginal) subsidy on informal care is reestablished. While the share of high career mothers continues to be distorted downward for incentive reasons, this policy is effective in reconciling the objectives of reducing the child care related gender inequalities and achieving a more equal income distribution across couples.

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This thesis consists of three essays in public economics. They study public intervention in markets where there are health-harming goods. The first chapter considers a situation where consumers can acquire two types of goods, each harmful to health but differing in their observability by the government (taxable or not). First, considering homogeneous individuals, the optimal taxes for these taxable and non-taxable harmful goods are calculated. Then, when the observability of consumption is limited, it is shown that the second optimal taxation rule depends on the degree of complementarity or substitutability between the two goods, observable and unobservable. Finally, redistributive issues are analyzed by considering on the one hand wealth inequalities and on the other hand differences in the perception of the damage caused by the consumption of harmful goods. Policy recommendations are proposed by considering physical inactivity and illegal drugs as harmful goods that cannot be taxed, and alcohol, tobacco and fatty and sugary products as harmful goods that can be. The second chapter focuses on the optimal policies for legalizing cannabis. Consumers differ in the utility they derive from the use of THC, the psychoactive component of cannabis, and have a misperception of the harm to their health from its use. The problem is analyzed using a vertical differentiation model where two firms, one public and one black market, compete on price and quality (THC content). A paternalistic government would like to correct, on the one hand, the excess of consumption linked to the bad perception of consumers of the damage caused by cannabis and, on the other hand, to reduce the size of the black market. We show that it is the desire to reduce the profits of the black market, rather than the lack of consumer perception, that explains why the optimal first-order consumption is not attainable in a decentralized market. We find two possible equilibria, where the public firm serves only those consumers with the highest or lowest propensity to pay for (cannabis) quality. Allowing the public firm to act first does not provide any benefit to the public firm and therefore does not improve social welfare. The third chapter analyzes how the policy of a neighboring jurisdiction, with the same characteristics as the domestic jurisdiction, affects the optimal domestic drug policy. Competition in the drug market is assumed to be imperfect, a black market is present, and consumers may make cross-border purchases. We consider that a drug policy consists of a choice between legalization and prohibition of drug sales on the one hand, and the intensity of investments to fight illegal production on the other. We assume that both drug use and black market profits have a negative social value. In equilibrium, if concern for drug use is low (high), then both jurisdictions adopt a policy of drug legalization (prohibition). More interestingly, for intermediate levels of the social value of drug use, the equilibria are asymmetric, which could explain, for example, why two symmetric jurisdictions adopt opposite policies in the fight against drugs. Moreover, in some circumstances, governments face a prisoner's dilemma. In the equilibrium, both jurisdictions legalize the sale of harmful drugs even though maintaining two prohibition policies would be socially preferable.

Introduction to the thematic issue on government‐provided services.

This paper studies the design of child-care policies when redistribution matters. Traditional mothers provide some informal child care, whereas career mothers purchase full time formal care in the market. The sorting of women across career paths is endogenous and shaped by a social norm about gender roles in the family. Via this social norm traditional mothersinformal child care imposes an externality on career mothers, so that the market outcome is inefficient. Informal care is too large and the group of career mothers is too small so that inefficiency and gender inequality go hand in hand. In a first-best, full information word redistribution across couples and efficiency are separable. Redistribution is performed via lump-sum transfers and taxes which are designed to equalize utilities across all couples. The efficient allocation of child care is obtained by subsidizing formal care at a Pigouvian rate. However, in a second-best settings, we show that a trade-off between the reduction of gender inequality and redistributive considerations emerge. The optimal uniform subsidy is lower than the Pigouvianlevel. Under a nonlinear policy the first-best Pigouvianrule for the (marginal) subsidy on informal care is reestablished. While the share of high career mothers continues to be distorted downward for incentive reasons, this policy is effective in reconciling the objectives of reducing the child care related gender inequalities and achieving a more equal income distribution across couples.

This paper considers an e-commerce market wherein a vertically integrated marketplace competes downstream with a single retailer and upstream with an independent parcel delivery operator. Because of the information collected by the marketplace on customersíhabits and preferences, the integrated parcel delivery operator has lower delivery costs than its competitor. Products are di§erentiated according to the retailer and the parcel operator who delivers them. The representation of product di§erentiation is inspired by the Anderson, De Palma and Thisse (2002) discrete choice model. We study several scenarios each representing a speciÖc policy implemented to regulate the marketplace. The Örst one is a data sharing policy. The integrated marketplace has to share its information with the other delivery operator which in turn will lower this operatorís cost of delivering the marketplaceís product. The second one is vertical separation under which the parcel delivery operator previously owned and managed by the marketplace becomes independent. Finally we consider a full dismantlement scenario under which there is both vertical and horizontal separation. We show that the optimal policy is either complete dismantlement or data sharing. The relative impacts on consumer surplus and total welfare of these two options involve a tradeo§ between the increased competition implied by complete dismantling and the data related delivery cost advantage achieved under data sharing. When this cost advantage is small, completely dismantling dominates, while data sharing is the best policy when the cost advantage is large.

The significant development of e-commerce and Internet marketplaces has provided numerous benefits to both retailers and customers. In addition, it has been a boon for delivery operators, allowing postal services to compensate at least in part revenue losses due to declining mail volumes. However, increasing concentration in e-commerce and the worry that market power may be extended into adjacent markets has turned into a major concern of policy makers and competition authorities. While many argue that traditional regulatory or competition policy may have to be amended within the context of platforms, there are so far few rigorous studies that can provide guidance.

We study long-term care (LTC) choices by families with mixed- or same-gender siblings. LTC can be provided either informally by children, or formally at home or in an institution. A social norm implies that daughters suffer a psychological cost when they provide less informal care than the average woman. Daughters have a lower wage than sons so that their opportunity cost of providing LTC is smaller. Families maximize a weighted sum of children’s and parent’s utilities. Because of the norm cost and the gender wage gap daughters will be the sole provider of informal LTC in mixed-siblings families. Sons provide LTC only if they have no female sibling. We show that the laissez-faire (LF) and the utilitarian first best (FB) differ for two reasons. First, because informal care imposes a negative externality on daughters via the social norm. Second, because the weights children and parents have in the family bargaining problem differ in general from their weights in social welfare. While these two problems are intertwined it appears that, unless children have a much larger weight than parents, too much informal care will be provided, especially by daughters, and that formal care should be subsidized. Previous papers suggest that LTC policies should “tolerate”, as a side effect, some crowding out of informal care and that the latter should be encouraged. Our results suggest instead that, because of the existing social norm about gender roles in the family, optimal policies should “discourage” informal care through subsidies on formal LTC.

We study long-term care (LTC) choices by families with mixed- or same-gender siblings. LTC can be provided either informally by children, or formally at home or in an institution. A social norm implies that daughters suffer a psychological cost when they provide less informal care than the average woman. Daughters have a lower wage than sons so that their opportunity cost of providing LTC is smaller. Families maximize a weighted sum of children’s and parent’s utilities. Because of the norm cost and the gender wage gap daughters will be the sole provider of informal LTC in mixed-siblings families. Sons provide LTC only if they have no female sibling. We show that the laissez-faire (LF) and the utilitarian first best (FB) differ for two reasons. First, because informal care imposes a negative externality on daughters via the social norm. Second, because the weights children and parents have in the family bargaining problem differ in general from their weights in social welfare. While these two problems are intertwined it appears that, unless children have a much larger weight than parents, too much informal care will be provided, especially by daughters, and that formal care should be subsidized. Previous papers suggest that LTC policies should “tolerate”, as a side effect, some crowding out of informal care and that the latter should be encouraged. Our results suggest instead that, because of the existing social norm about gender roles in the family, optimal policies should “discourage” informal care through subsidies on formal LTC.

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We study optimal commodity taxes under household bargaining. We focus on the taxation of ‘female’ and ‘male’ products. The expressions for the tax rates include Pigouvian and incentive terms. When the female spouse has the lower bargaining weight, the Pigouvian term calls for a subsidization of the ‘female good’, and a taxation of the ‘male good’. The incentive term depends on the distribution of bargaining weights across couples. When the bargaining weight of the female spouse increases with wages, the female good will be consumed in larger proportion by more productive couples. In this case the Pigouvian term is mitigated.

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One of the pervasive problems with means-tested public long-term care programs is their inability to prevent individuals who could afford private long-term services from taking advantage of public care. They often manage to elude the means-test net through ‘strategic impoverishment’. We show in a simple model how this problem comes about, how it affects welfare and how it can be mitigated.

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The French abstract was not provided by the author.

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When family assistance is uncertain, benefits cannot be conditioned on family aid. We study the role of private and public LTC insurance in this environment and compare the properties and optimality of the topping up versus opting out public insurance schemes. Under topping up, the required LTC is less than full insurance and should be provided publicly unless private insurance market for dependency is fair. With an opting out scheme, there will be three possible equilibria depending on the children's degree of altruism. These imply: full LTC insurance with no aid from children, less than full insurance just enough to induce aid, and full insurance with aid. Fair private insurance can support only the first equilibrium. Opting out policies are self-targeted and dominate topping up schemes when the degree of children's altruism is sufficiently large. However, when the degree of altruism is small the dominance goes in the opposite direction.

This paper restores many of the Ramsey tax/pricing lessons perceived as outdated in the optimal tax literature following the Atkinson and Stiglitz (J Public Econ 6:55–75, 1976) framework wherein differential commodity taxes are considered to be redundant. The key to our findings is the incorporation of a “break-even constraint” for public firms into the Atkinson and Stiglitz framework. Break-even constraints are fundamental to the regulatory pricing literature but have somehow been overlooked in the optimal tax literature. Incorporating them reconciles the optimal-tax and the regulatory-pricing views on Ramsey tax/pricing rules.

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This paper studies the determination of informal long-term care (family aid) to dependent elderly in a worst case scenario concerning the "harmony" of family relations. Children are purely selfish, and neither side can make credible commitments (which rules out efficient bargaining). The model is based on Becker's "rotten kid" specification except that it explicitly accounts for the sequence of decisions. In Becker's world, with a single good, this setting yields efficiency. We show that when family aid (and long-term care services in general) are introduced the outcome is likely to be inefficient. Still, the rotten kid mechanism is at work and ensures that a positive level of aid is provided as long as the bequest motive is operative. We identify the inefficiencies by comparing the laissez-faire (subgame perfect) equilibrium to the first-best allocation. We initially assume that families are identical ex ante. However, the case where dynasties differ in wealth is also considered. We study how the provision of long-term care (LTC) can be improved by public policies under various informational assumptions. Interestingly, crowding out of private aid by public LTC is not a problem in this setting. With an operative bequest motive, public LTC will have no impact on private aid. More amazingly still, when the bequest motive is (initially) not operative, public insurance may even enhance the provision of informal aid.

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This paper studies the design of a social long-term care (LTC) insurance when altruism is two-sided. The laissez-faire solution is not efficient, unless there is perfect altruism. Under full information, the first-best can be decentralized by a linear subsidy on informal aid, a linear tax on bequests when the parent is dependent and state specific lump-sum transfers which provide insurance. We also study a second-best scheme comprising a LTC benefit, a payroll tax on children's earnings and an inheritance tax. This scheme redistributes resources across individuals and between the states of nature and the tax on children's labor enhances informal care to compensate for the children's possible less than full altruism.

Individuals, differing in productivity and life expectancy, vote over the size and type of a collective annuity. Its type is represented by the fraction of the contributive (Bismarckian) component (based on the worker�s past earnings) as opposed to the non- contributive (Beveridgean) part (based on average contribution). The equilibrium collective annuity is either a large mostly Bismarckian program, a smaller pure Beveridgean one (in accordance with empirical evidence), or nil. A larger correlation between longevity and productivity, or a larger average life expectancy, both make the equilibrium collective annuity program more Beveridgean, although at the expense of its size.

A fat and a healthy good provide immediate gratification, and cause health costs or benefits in the long run, which are misperceived. Additionally, the fat good (healthy good) increases (decreases) health care costs by increasing (decreasing) the probability of suffering from a chronic disease in the future. Individuals differ in income and in their degree of misperceptions concerning the health effects of the consumption of fat and of healthy goods. The level of the fat tax is determined through majority voting. Individuals vote according to their misperceived utility function. Consequently, excessive fat consumption is not due to a self-control problem but due to information deficiencies or cognitive inability to process information. A fraction of the fat tax proceeds is “earmarked” to reduce health insurance premiums while the remaining fraction finances a subsidy on the healthy good. This earmarking rule is determined at a constitutional stage to maximize utilitarian or Rawlsian welfare, anticipating the induced political equilibrium. We show that the fat tax in the political equilibrium is always lower than the utilitarian fat tax. This is no longer necessarily true with a Rawlsian objective. The determination of the optimal earmarking rule is quite complex. Even in the utilitarian case, it is not just used to boost political support for the fat tax. Instead, it may involve a tradeoff between the fat tax and the healthy good subsidy.

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This paper studies how the risk of divorce affects the human capital decisions of a young couple. We consider a setting where complete specialization is optimal with no divorce risk. Couples can self-insure through savings which offers some protection to the uneducated spouse, but at the expense of a distortion. Alternatively, for large divorce probabilities, symmetry in education, where both spouses receive an equal amount of education, may be optimal. This eliminates the risk associated with the lack of education, but reduces the efficiency of education choices. We show that the symmetric allocation will become more attractive as the probability of divorce increases, if risk aversion is high and/or labor supply elasticity is low. However, it is only a “second-best” solution as insurance protection is achieved at the expense of an efficiency loss. Finally, we study how the (economic) use of marriage is affected by the possibility of divorce.

We show that the celebrated Atkinson and Stiglitz (1976) result on the uniformity of the commodity tax rates when preferences are weakly separable between goods and leisure does not hold when (at least) one of the goods is produced within the household. The result is restored if preferences are weakly separable in market goods on the one hand, and leisure and household goods on the other.

We show that once interfamily exchanges are considered, Becker?s rotten kids mechan- ism has some remarkable implications that have gone hitherto unnoticed. Specifically, we establish that Cornes and Silva's (1999) result of e¢fficiency in the contribution game amongst siblings extends to a setting where the contributors (spouses) belong to different families. More strikingly still, the mechanism does not just have consequences for efficiency but it may have dramatic redistributive implications. In particular, we show that the rotten kids mechanism combined with a contribution game to a house- hold public good may lead to an astonishing equalization of consumptions between the spouses and their parents, even when their parents'wealth levels differ. We consider two families, each consisting of a parent and an adult child, who are "linked"by the young spouses. Children contribute part of their time to a household (couple) public good and provide attention to their respective parents"in exchange"for a bequest. Spouses behave towards their respective parents like Becker's rotten kids. they are purely selfish and anticipate that their altruistic parents will leave them a bequest. The most striking results obtain when wages are equal and when parents'initial wealth levels are not too different. For very large wealth differences the mechanism must be supplemented by a (mandatory) transfer that brings them back into the relevant range. When wages differ but are similar the outcome will be near efficient (and near egalitarian).

This paper examines if an energy price shock should be compensated by a reduction in energy taxes to mitigate its impact on consumer prices. It shows that the consumer price should not increase by as much as the producer price, implying a small reduction in the energy tax in dollars. The energy tax rate, on the other hand, decreases sharply. This decline is primarily due to an adjustment in the Pigouvian component: A constant marginal social damage being divided by a higher producer price. The redistributive component of the tax remains at about 10% of the social cost of energy.

This thesis is devoted to the problems of old age dependency which is increasingly becoming a "hot" topic in today's aging societies. The thesis consists of three independent chapters that address different issues related to dependency by highlighting the interaction between three institutions: the family, the state, and the market. Chapter 1 focuses on the interaction between the family and the market by investigating intra-family moral hazard as one potential explanation for the "LTC insurance conundrum," namely the surprisingly low demand for private LTC insurance. The intrafamily moral hazard argument, proposed by Pauly (1990), is based on the idea that insurance induces children to favor formal help for their parents (and thus reduce their informal help) because the cost of formal help is (at least in part) covered by the insurer and thus reduces the parents' future inheritance less than in the case without insurance. Parents who value their children's help may therefore forgo purchasing insurance. The chapter proposes and formally investigates the idea that the magnitude of intra-family moral hazard and, therefore, of not purchasing LTC insurance may be different in the case where insurance benefits are lump sum and in the case where they are proportional to LTC expenses. The results not only formally confirm that lump sum benefits help to limit intra-family moral hazard but also demonstrate that in some cases they eliminate it completely, while the effect of proportional benefits is ambiguous at best. As a result, the chapter shows that a parent is more likely to decide to purchase LTC insurance when the benefits are lump sum than when they are proportional. Based on these results, the chapter also offers some observations about public policy. The role of public intervention is further explored in Chapter 2, which analyzes optimal LTC policy in the context of intra-family moral hazard. In addition to addressing the inefficiencies present in this context, the chapter addresses the redistributional issues associated with wealth heterogeneity. The analysis reveals that intra-family moral hazard is a sufficient justification for insurance-based public intervention: if not necessarily for the introduction of compulsory public insurance, at least for the taxation or subsidization of private insurance premiums. While the first two chapters study the family from the perspective of the parent-child relationship, Chapter 3 invites consideration of another important but so far much less analyzed context, namely the context of older spouses. The chapter proposes a theoretical model of the dependency-related problems faced by an elderly couple and explores the optimal public intervention in this context as well as providing interesting observations about private LTC insurance for both the wife and the man.

Pricing strategies for parcels delivery from e-commerce remain a hot topic for postal and parcel delivery operators. As shown by Borsenberger (2015), the e-commerce sector is subject to concentration trends, due to a fierce price competition between retailers, the existence of increasing returns to scale in e-commerce activity, and the importance of retailers’ reputation to attract consumers.

This paper studies the political economy of a basic income (BI) versus a means tested welfare scheme. We show in a very simple setting that if society votes on the type of system, its generosity as well as the “severity” of means testing (if any), a BI system could only emerge in the political equilibrium under very strong and empirically implausible conditions. Instead, the political process leads to a means tested system. The necessity to draw political support does affect the design of the system, but it only implies that means testing becomes less severe so that benefits are extended also to themiddle classes. However, a fully universal system is rejected by a majority.

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We study the role of social long-term care (LTC) insurance when income taxation and private insurance markets are imperfect. Policy instruments include public provision of LTC as well as a subsidy on private insurance. The subsidy scheme may be linear or nonlinear. For the linear part we consider an arbitrary number of types, characterized by earnings and survival probabilities. In the nonlinear part, society consists of three types: poor, middle class and rich. The first type is too poor to provide for dependence. the middle class type purchases private insurance and the high income type is self-insured. The main questions are at what level LTC should be provided to the poor and whether it is desirable to subsidize private LTC for the middle class. Interestingly, the results are not totally similar under both linear and nonlinear schemes. First, whereas in the linear case a subsidy of private LTC insurance is desirable, it is not in the nonlinear case (at least at the margin). Second, the desirability of public provision of LTC services depends on the way the income tax is restricted. In the linear case, it may be desirable only if no demogrant (uniform lump-sum transfer) is available. In the nonlinear case, public provision is desirable when the income tax is sufficiently restricted. Specifically, this is the case when the income is subject only to a proportional payroll tax while the LTC reimbursement policy can be nonlinear.

We study the delivery market for e-commerce products, with two technologies: home delivery and delivery to a relay point. Taste differences for these are represented by a Hotelling model. Operators choose the (costly) quality of their delivery service. We study a single operator who uses both technologies and a duopoly with two single-technology operators. The home delivery operator may or may not be regulated. the relay operator is not regulated. We study pricing policies and the impact of competition on welfare. We also show that quality regulation may have an adverse effect on welfare.

We study exchanges between three overlapping generations with non-dynastic altruism. The middleaged choose informal care provided to their parents and education expenditures for their children. The young enjoy their education, while the old may leave a bequest to their children. Within each period the three generations play a “game” inspired by Becker’s (1974, 1991) rotten kids framework, with the added features that the rotten kids turn into the altruistic parent in the next period and that parents invest in the education of their children. We show that Becker’s rotten kids theorem holds for the single period game in that informal aid is set according to an efficient rule. However, education is distorted upwards. In the stationary equilibrium the levels of both transfers are inefficient: education is too large and informal aid is too low.

We build an analytical model a la Hotelling describing the process of e-substitution in the market for transactional mail. A generic firm sells a final good to customers, with each unit sold requiring one unit of communication between firm and customer, which can take the form of either letter mail or of an e-substitute. A fraction of customers has no access to the e-substitute technology, and the other customers differ in their exogenous preference for mail vs substitute. Also, the communications strategy of the business impacts on the demand for its final product, with letter mail may be preferred for some types of communications, on the grounds that it could increase overall demand. We then calibrate the model and show how the extent of e-substitution depends on the distribution of preferences, the objective function of the representative firm, and on how much mail impacts the firm’s final demand. We conclude with suggestions as to how this analysis may inform a postal operator intent on slowing down e-substitution.

This paper studies how the risk of divorce affects the human capital decisions of a young couple. We consider a setting where complete specialization is optimal with no divorce risk. Couples can self-insure through savings which offers some protection to the uneducated spouse, but at the expense of a distortion. Alternatively, for large divorce probabilities, symmetry in education, where both spouses receive an equal amount of education, may be optimal. This eliminates the risk associated with the lack of education, but reduces the efficiency of education choices. We show that the symmetric allocation will become more attractive as the probability of divorce increases, if risk aversion is high and/or labor supply elasticity is low. However, it is only a "second-best" solution as insurance protection is achieved at the expense of an efficiency loss. Finally, we study how the (economic) use of marriage is affected by the possibility of divorce.

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Mobility across countries is often suspected to affect the coexistence of different social insurance systems. A wide variety of social protection systems exist within the EU. Some are of Beveridgean inspiration (with universal and more or less flat benefits), while others are mainly Bismarcldan (with benefits related to past contributions). Concerns about the sustainability of the most generous and redistributive (Beveridgean) insurance systems are often based on the assumption of (near) perfect and costless mobility. In reality, labor mobility remains limited. Such low levels of migration rates could, mistakenly, lead to the conclusion that migration would currently not be affecting the redistributive social insurance systems. We address this issue in a two-country setting, where mobility is costly and where individuals differ in mobility cost (attachment to their native country). A Bismarckian insurance system is not affected by migration while a Beveridgean one is. Our results suggest that the race-to-the-bottom affecting tax rates may be more important under Beveridge-Beveridge competition than under Beveridge-Bismarck competition. Finally, we study the strategic choice of the type of social protection. We show that Bismarckian governments may find it beneficial to adopt a Beveridgen insurance system.

The world spends a significative and steadily increasing share of its resources on health care. Debates about health care financing models and practitioner payment methods are taking place around the world. Nevertheless, there is still no consensus on the ideal choice of financing mechanisms. This thesis aims to contribute to the debates on health care financing and health services policy. Chapter 1 examines the optimal nonlinear practitioner compensation rule, the principle under pay-for-performance, fee-for-service, and capitation in the presence of both adverse selection and moral hazard at the offre level. We found that when moral hazard is the only problem, fee-for-service can only lead to substitution of treatment quantity for practitioner effort, which is inefficient. As a result, fee-for-service payment should not be used in this case. However, when moral hazard combines with the problem of adverse selection, efficacious screening requires continued use of the fee-for-service system for low-productivity practitioners and less use of the pay-for-performance system. The development of payment utilization improves screening. We provide arguments on critical analysis of fee-for-service weaknesses. And, most importantly, we establish the reasons for the continued use of fee-for-service despite the fact that serious problems with the system have been widely recognized. Chapter Two analyzes the problem of the trilateral contract between payer, patient, and practitioner, where the practitioner and patient can agree to exploit mutually beneficial opportunities. Assuming that a secondary transfer between the patient and the practitioner is excluded, we analyze the problem of setting up the mechanism where the practitioner and the patient submit the diagnosis claim to the payer through a declaration game. We also derive the optimal insurance and payment scheme for the patient and practitioner. The optimal scheme of insurance and payment that is collusion-proof (weak) is such that one of the two tells the truth . but the payer's trade-off is different depending on the different ways it chooses to allocate incentives between the patient and the practitioner. Furthermore, we show that if the payer is successful in having both parties present the diagnosis sequentially, the advantage of the second agent's veto power allows the payer to achieve the best outcome. My secondary area of study deals with development economics. The third chapter aims to examine whether migration from villages to cities leads to a crowding out of informal risk-sharing contracts and leads households to less (self-)insurance for consumption in Thai villages. In terms of theoretical motivation, our idea is that migration can be used as an investment contract made in advance between the household and the child. The household invests by paying in advance in exchange for future payments depending on circumstances, which changes the household income process. For estimation, we used the Townsend Thai Annual Surveys (1997-2010) table. The hypothesis of no selection bias is rejected at the village insurance market level, supporting our conjecture that migration changes the risk-sharing status of households within the village. When biases are corrected, our results show that migration leads to crowding out of informal risk sharing in the village and even leads to a decrease in Thai households' consumption (self-)insurance.

We study competition in two-sided markets with a common network externality rather those than with the standard inter-group effects. This type of externality occurs when both groups benefit, possibly with different intensities, from an increase in the size of one group and from a decrease in the size of the other. We explain why common externality is relevant for the health and education sectors. We focus on symmetric equilibrium and show that when the externality itself satisfies a homogeneity condition then platforms’ profits and price structures have some specific properties. Our results reveal how the rents coming from network externalities are shifted by platforms from one side to the other, according to the homogeneity degree. Prices are affected but in such a way that platforms only transfer rents from consumers to providers. In the specific but realistic case where the common network externality is homogeneous of degree zero, platforms’ profits do not depend on the intensity of the (common) network externality. This result differs from those of the two-sided models, which deal with standard positive inter-group network externality.

This paper examines whether myopia (misperception of the old age dependency risk) and private insurance market loading costs can justify public long-term care (LTC) provision and/or the subsidization of private insurance. Individuals differ in dependency risk, productivity and degree of risk misperception. The former two are positively correlated (because of the longevity factor) and social insurance tends to be regressive. A first-best solution requires subsidization of private insurance and/or public provision of the appropriate level of LTC. The support for these instruments is less strong in a second-best setting, as there may be a conflict between the correction for myopia and redistribution. Public LTC provision is never optimal when private insurance markets are fair (irrespective of the proportion of myopic individuals and their degree of misperception). Under loading costs, the solution may require a combination of private and public insurance or even rely solely on public provision.

We study the role of social long-term care (LTC) insurance when income taxation and private insurance markets are imperfect. Policy instruments include public provision of LTC as well as a subsidy on private insurance. The subsidy scheme may be linear or nonlinear. For the linear part we consider an arbitrary number of types, characterized by earnings and survival probabilities. In the nonlinear part, society consists of three types: poor, middle class and rich. The first type is too poor to provide for dependence. the middle class type purchases private insurance and the high income type is self-insured. The main questions are at what level LTC should be provided to the poor and whether it is desirable to subsidize private LTC for the middle class. Interestingly, the results are not totally similar under both linear and nonlinear schemes. First, whereas in the linear case a subsidy of private LTC insurance is desirable, it is not in the nonlinear case (at least at the margin). Second, the desirability of public provision of LTC services depends on the way the income tax is restricted. In the linear case, it may be desirable only if no demogrant (uniform lump-sum transfer) is available. In the nonlinear case, public provision is desirable when the income tax is sufficiently restricted. Specifically, this is the case when the income is subject only to a proportional payroll tax while the LTC reimbursement policy can be nonlinear.

This paper studies public provision of long-term care insurance in a world in which family assistance is (i) uncertain and (ii) endogenous, depending on the time parents spend raising their children. Public benefits will be paid in case of disability but cannot be combined with self-insurance or family aid. The benefits are provided equally to all recipients and financed by a proportional payroll tax. The paper shows that tax distortions imply that full insurance is undesirable. It characterizes the optimal tax and identifies the elements that determine its size. Of crucial importance are the extent of under-insurance, the effect of the tax on the probability of altruism, the distortionary effect of the tax, and, with wage heterogeneity, the covariance between the social marginal utility of lifetime income and (i) earnings (positive effect) and (ii) the probability of altruism default (negative effect).

We consider an industry where an upstream firm determines the size of a network used by two downstream firms. We contrast ownership unbundling and legal unbundling, where the upstream firm maximizes its total profit, including the profit of its downstream subsidiary(ies), but does not discriminate between them. Furthermore, each downstream subsidiary maximizes its own profit. We show that ownership separation is more detrimental to welfare than legal unbundling, whether the downstream market is perfectly competitive or not, and whether there are asymmetries in network needs across downstream firms, and downstream investments, or not.

In this thesis I study three problems concerning the economics of education. The first one studies the formulation of education policies in an optimal taxation model. I show that education policy depends on the relationship between ability and the elasticity of wages with respect to education. The second studies the effects of government intervention in the composition and segregation of school audiences. I show that such intervention is desirable only if there are differences in the sensitivity of the production function to the labor supply of individuals with different knowledge. The third studies the relationship between educational standards and tuition in a model in which firms do not observe the productivity of the individual, but whether the individual has graduated. I show that a school that focuses on the amount of tuition will set a very inefficient policy in which all students graduate.

The purpose of this thesis is to study some problems posed by the market power of firms to two types of public intervention: regulation and taxation of goods.

In this thesis, some issues related to public health insurance and health policy are discussed from a theoretical perspective. The first chapter compares two different methods of paying the insured: reimbursement in kind and reimbursement on treatment costs. In the model, an adverse selection parameter characterizes consumers: individuals have a low or high propensity for medical care. Therefore, the insurance company has the choice between implementing a pooling contract and a self-selecting contract. The results show that, when the benefits are pooling, the reimbursement on treatment costs dominates the reimbursement in kind. In contrast, when benefits are self-selecting, the two types of reimbursement are equivalent from a welfare perspective. The second chapter analyzes secondary prevention as a "self-insurance" instrument. The optimal linear reimbursement for prevention and treatment is determined. The two cases of substitute and complementary goods are analyzed. The results show that treatment consumption should always be encouraged. If treatment and prevention are substitutes, the consumption of prevention should be encouraged, and, on the contrary, if the two goods are complementary, it should be discouraged. The third chapter deals with the problem of the credibility of public authorities when certain health policies are exercised. The government uses taxation and information campaigns with the dual objective of internalizing a negative externality to consumption and informing individuals about the side effects of that consumption. Technically, this amounts to analyzing a signal model with "cheap talk". The results show that the equilibrium game cannot be efficient because the government always wants to manipulate the information.

In this thesis, we analyze, from a theoretical point of view, different interventions of the government in the choice of social insurance mechanisms, in the framework of a global redistribution policy. In the first chapter, the government intervenes on the demand side of the agents. In response to the presence of moral hazard, it introduces incentive insurance coverage. Characterized by two parameters, risk and income, individuals can in fact reduce the frequency of risks. Whatever the correlation between the inequality factors, including when the poorest are the most at risk, the rules determining optimal social insurance are modified and the coverage may be partial but retains, despite the presence of an optimal tax, a redistributive role. The second chapter examines, in the field of health, government intervention on the supply side. When there are demand induction phenomena, the physician remuneration mechanism that guarantees the social optimum is a capitation payment system. When quality is endogenous, this same government cannot induce optimality and the remuneration system set up favours one or other of the aspects, quality or cost reduction. In the third chapter, we ask to what extent a government has an interest in favoring opting out when the public provision of insurance is characterized by exogenous inefficiency. When the government adopts the rawls criterion, we show, public insurance never goes away. However, it is optimal to favor the exit of some individuals. The choice of regime that determines the types of individuals who remain beneficiaries of public insurance depends strongly on the structure of inequalities in the economy and the individual taste for quality.

This thesis proposes a study of three important problems for developing countries, namely poverty, tax evasion and corruption. The first chapter introduces poverty in Mirrlees' (1971) optimal taxation problem. Poverty is considered as an aggregate negative externality. The optimal nonlinear taxation scheme has some interesting properties. Indeed, negative marginal tax rates emerge at least for the least productive. This induces them to work more and earn more income. Despite the presence of negative marginal tax rates, it is possible to recover the classic result of zero marginal rates at the ends of the distribution by reasoning in terms of social rather than individual distortions. The second chapter introduces tax evasion by assuming that revenues are only observable after an expensive audit. The frame of reference is that of a finite economy that allows for the correlation between information privately held by individuals. It is then possible to show that any first-order optimum is implementable by the combination of a generalized taxation and a generalized audit system. However, only a subset of the pareto efficient frontier is implementable when the generalized taxation system is replaced by a classical taxation system. In contrast to the literature on tax evasion, in equilibrium no one is audited and all but the most productive evade. Finally, the third and last chapter deals with corruption. We consider a tax agency that wants to maximize tax revenue and must hire inspectors to collect taxes. The inspectors must make an expensive and unobservable effort to determine the true income of taxpayers, so there is a moral hazard problem. In addition, there is an adverse selection problem since inspectors may be honest or corruptible but their type is private information. A compensation scheme such that only corruptible inspectors are willing to be hired may be optimal.

In this thesis we analyze, from a theoretical point of view, the political choice of social insurance and pay-as-you-go pension systems. The first chapter reviews the literature on the political economy of redistribution, social insurance and pay-as-you-go pensions. The second chapter emphasizes the need to take into account certain political constraints when choosing social insurance systems. These systems are defined here by two parameters, the contribution rate and the degree of redistribution. While the optimal system from a social welfare point of view is a fully redistributive system, we show that introducing a policy constraint on the contribution rate can lead to the adoption of a partially redistributive system. The third chapter deals with the determination of pay-as-you-go pension systems. We show that a pension system that redistributes income among the working population can be supported in the steady state by the majority of voters, even when the interest rate is higher than the population growth rate. Finally, the possibility of a negative shock to the population growth rate leads to the adoption of a fully redistributive system at a constitutional stage. A minimum pension is then imposed in order to protect the generations of the demographic transition. The last chapter also deals with pay-as-you-go pensions. Beyond the choice of contribution rate, society must decide to implement a reform, which is in no way linked to the pension system. This reform divides working people but leaves retirees indifferent. Using a political agency model, we show that, when the number of retirees is sufficiently large, the contribution rate chosen by society is higher than the one preferred by young people, who constitute the majority of voters.