Professor Guy Laroque

Consider a simple general equilibrium economy with one representative consumer, a single competitive firm and the government. Suppose that the government has to finance public expenditures using linear consumption taxes and/or a lump-sum tax on profits redistributed to the consumer. We show that, if the tax rate on profits cannot exceed 100 percent, one cannot improve upon the second-best optimum of an economy with constant returns to scale by using a less efficient profit-generating decreasing returns to scale technology.

We study a general model of occupational choice and optimal income taxation where agents have private cost of work that differ across occupations and have both deterministic and random components. We apply our framework to study the work decisions of couples in an extensive set up and give necessary and sufficient conditions under which joint-working households should be subsidized compared to single-worker households.

Redistribution by means of lotteries

We put forward a method for estimating discount rates using wealth and income data. We build consumption from these data using the budget constraint. Consumption transitions yield discount rates by household groups. Applying this technique to a sample of older households, we find a similar distribution to those previously estimated using field data, though with a much lower mean than those found using experiments. Surprisingly, among this older population, patience is negatively correlated with education and numeracy. This goes against the positive correlation found for younger populations in experiments and some field studies. We discuss potential explanations for this result.

This paper documents the heterogeneity in labor market volatility across ages and gender in the United States over 1976-2014.

A model of labour supply is developed in which individuals face restrictions on hours choices. Observed hours reflect both the distribution of preferences and the distribution of offers.

A model of labour supply is developed in which individuals face restrictions on hours choices. Observed hours reflect both the distribution of preferences and the distribution of offers.

This paper provides a new analysis of the main stylised facts underlying the evolution of labour supply at the extensive and intensive margins in three countries: the United States, the United Kingdom and France. We propose a definition of the extensive and intensive margins corresponding respectively to the employment rate and to hours when employed. This definition is robust to the choice of the reference period and we develop a new statistical decomposition that provides bounds on changes at these margins. We focus on longer-run labour supply changes over the period 1977 to 2007 and abstract from the shorter-run impact of recessions. Examining secular changes over this period, we show that both margins matter in explaining changes in total hours. We then provide a detailed analysis across countries and across time by demographic type. Given the large systematic differences we uncover in the importance of these margins by age and gender, it is unlikely that a single explanation will suffice to account for the macroeconomic evolutions in the three countries.

This paper provides a new analysis of the main stylised facts underlying the evolution of labour supply at the extensive and intensive margins in three countries: the United States, the United Kingdom and France.

This paper puts forward a method for estimating individual discount rates using field data on wealth and income.

Heterogeneity in time preference in older households

In this paper we propose a systematic way of examining the importance of the extensive and the intensive margins of labor supply in order to explain the overall movements in total hours of work over time.

This paper documents the key stylised facts underlying the evolution of labour supply at the extensive and intensive margins in the last forty years in three countries: United-States, United-Kingdom and France.

This article addresses the issue of heterogeneity as an important determinant of the shape of optimal tax schemes.

We study optimal taxation in the general extensive model.

In a second best environment, the optimal policy choice sometimes follows the first best rules.