What was the role of consumption structure evolution in the industrialization phases of the Western world since the 18th century? To answer this question, we first ask the économical ad historical literature. We detify the main phases of consumption structure evolution and establish a plausible...

Through a long-period analysis of the inter-temporal relations between the French markets for credit default swaps (CDS), shares and bonds between 2001 and 2008, this article shows how a financial innovation like CDS could heighten financial instability. After describing the operating principles...

Many observers argue that the abnormal accumulation of risk by banks has been one of the major causes of the 2007-2009 …nancial turmoil. But what could have pushed banks to engage in such a risk race? The answer brought by this paper builds on the classical signaling model by Spence. If banks'...

This paper presents another definition of substitutes and complements. It follows a dual approach using the Luenberger's benefit function. The benefit function measures the amount of a reference bundle that an individual would be willing to give up to move from a given utility level to any...

The paper argues that the world economy might experiment inflationary pressures (or restrictive policies aimed at fighting them) when the economic depression triggered by the financial crisis is stabilized. The primary cause is that bad money has been (endogenously) delivered which did not lead...

This paper deals with two elements of Thomas Kuhn (1962) ideas regarding paradigm: Depletion and resiliency. The possibility of paradigm depletion taking resilience into account, given the hierarchy among scientists, is modeled as a Stackelberg differential game between editors [leaders] and...

Criticism is mounting on business schools for their excessive focus on research and for neglecting teaching. We show that if students have imperfect information about a school's overall capabilities and if business schools differ in their research productivity, the least productive schools may...

TaxMe-Online is the online tax declaration system of the Canton of Bern in Switzerland, where each of the 26 Cantons has its own fiscal regime and taxation system. In 2008 it was used by almost 26 percent of the Canton of Bern taxpayers (42% used the TaxMe-CD or other software, and the last...

Road safety policies often use incentive mechanisms based on traffic violations to promote safe driving. Examples of mechanisms are fines, experience rating and point-record driving licenses. We analyse the effectiveness of these mechanisms in promoting safe driving. We derive their theoretical...

Recent publications in the field of Intellectual Property (IP) have shown that the previous literature did not grasp how complex patents are. The goal of this paper is to present an overview of all identified functions of patents and of the main strategic implications of such a complex picture....