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Catastrophic risks are often characterised by a low probability, a high severity and a large number of affected individuals. Taking these specificities into account, we analyse the capacity of insurance contracts to provide coverage for those risks, independently from the market failures frequently observed in practice. On the demand side, we characterise individual preferences under which the willingness to pay for the coverage of large losses remains significant, although their occurrence probability is very small. On the supply side, the correlation between individual losses affects the insurance pricing through the insurers’ cost of capital. Analysing the interaction between demand and supply yields the key determinants of insurability and of a socially optimal risk sharing strategy.

This paper studies the effect of income inequality on selection and aggregate productivity in a general equilibrium model with non-homothetic preferences and product quality. The model matches the empirical fact that an increase in income shifts one’s consumption towards goods that have higher quality both at the intensive and extensive margins. It also implies a negative relationship between the number and quantity of goods consumed by an income group and the earnings of other income groups. The central result is that a mean-preserving spread of the income distribution negatively affects aggregate productivity through the softening of firms’ selection. In the presence of international trade, this effect is amplified with lower trade barriers or a larger number of trade partners. Furthermore, the model implies that the domestic expenditure shares and welfare gains from trade are constant across income groups. A simple quantitative exercise suggests that an income redistribution like the one induced by the US Federal taxes and transfers raises average productivity by about 3%.

This article investigates the role of private insurance in the prevention and mitigation of natural disasters. We characterize the equity-efficiency trade-off faced by the policymakers under imperfect information about individual prevention costs. It is shown that a competitive insurance market with actuarial rate making and compensatory tax-subsidy transfers is likely to dominate regulated uniform insurance pricing rules or state-funded assistance schemes. The model illustrates how targeted tax cuts on insurance contracts can improve the incentives to prevention while compensating individuals with high prevention costs. The article highlights the complementarity between individual incentives through tax cuts and collective incentives through grants to the local jurisdictions where risk management plans are enforced.

This paper studies how the strength of social ties is affected by the geographical location of other individuals and their social capital. We characterize the equilibrium in terms of both social interactions and social capital. We show that lower travel costs increase not only the interaction frequency but also the social capital for all agents. We also show that the equilibrium frequency of interactions is lower than the efficient one. Using a unique geocoded data set of friendship networks among adolescents in the United States, we structurally estimate the model and show that indeed agents socially interact less than that at the first best optimum. Our policy analysis suggests that, at the same cost, subsidizing social interactions yield a higher total welfare than subsidizing transportation costs.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. We first investigate whether product market regulations affect commodity taxation in open-to-trade economies, and second, we study the strategic interaction in regulatory measures between trading partner countries. We present a two-country general equilibrium model in which destination-based commodity taxes finance public goods, and product market regulation affects both the number of firms in the market and product diversity. Based on data for 21 OECD countries over the 1990–2008 period, we provide empirical evidence suggesting that product market regulations are strategic complement policies and that domestic regulations have a negative impact on domestic commodity taxation.

In the linear coinsurance problem, examined first by Mossin (1968), a higher absolute risk aversion with respect to wealth in the sense of Arrow-Pratt implies a higher optimal coinsurance rate. We show that this property does not hold for health insurance under ex post moral hazard; i.e., when illness severity cannot be observed by insurers, and policyholders decide on their health expenditures. The optimal coinsurance rate trades off a risk-sharing effect and an incentive effect, both related to risk aversion.

This paper studies the costs and benefits of fixed and flexible exchange rate regimes in the presence of endogenous intensive and extensive margins of trade. The net benefit depends on the levels and volatilities of those margins as well as on their correlation with consumers' preferences. A fixed exchange rate regime is preferred for sufficiently high labour supply elasticities and lower love for product diversity. Delays between entry and production make fixed exchange rate regimes less attractive. Ce texte étudie les coûts et avantages des régimes de taux de change fixes et flexibles en présence de marges de commerce endogènes extensives et intensives. Les avantages nets dépendent des niveaux et de la volatilité de ces marges ainsi que de leurs corrélations avec les préférences des consommateurs. On préfère un régime de taux de change fixes quand les élasticités des offres de travail sont suffisamment élevées et l'intérêt pour la diversité des produits est relativement faible. Des délais entre l'entrée et la production rendent les régimes de taux de change fixes moins attrayants.

This paper discusses the role of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in the market for carbon quotas and countries' commitments to reduce their carbon emission levels. We show that the CDM contributes to an efficient funding of clean technology investments in least developed countries. However, the CDM is not neutral on the global level of carbon emissions as it entices countries to raise their emission caps. The CDM may also make inappropriate the inclusion of any country that takes no emission abatement commitment. It can even make inefficient a country's decision to commit to an emission target. The implications of the presence of non-additional projects are also analyzed. Nous montrons que le MDP contribue à un financement efficace dans des technologies propres dans les pays les moins développés. Cependant, le MDP n'est pas neutre sur le niveau global des émissions de carbone car il pousse les pays à relever leurs plafonds d'émission. Le MDP est également susceptible de rendre inappropriée l'inclusion dans le marché carbone d'un pays qui ne s'engagerait pas à des réductions contraignantes. Il peut même rendre inefficace la décision d'un pays de s'engager sur un plafond d'émission. Les implications de la présence éventuelle de projets non-additionnels est également discutée.

In this paper, we study the costs and benefits of the adoption of a policy of free movement of workers. For countries to agree on uncontrolled movements of workers, short-run costs must be outweighed by the long-term benefits of better labor-market flexibility and income smoothing. We show that such a policy is less likely to be adopted when workers are more impatient and less risk-averse, when production technologies display stronger decreasing returns, and when countries trade a significant share of their products.

We characterize the design of insurance schemes when policyholders face several insurable risks in a context of adverse selection. Splitting risks emerges as a feature of second-best Pareto optimality. This may take the form of risk-specific contracts, or of contracts where risks are bundled but subject to differential coverage rules, such as risk-specific copayments combined with a deductible or a cap on coverage.