• This paper addresses revolutionary changes in the education, fertility and market work of U.S. families formed in the 1870s-1920s: Fertility fell from 5.3 to 2.6; the graduation rate of their children increased from 7 to 50 percent; and the fraction of adulthood wives devoted to market-oriented work increased from 7 to 23 percent (by one measure).
• These trends are addressed within a unified framework to examine the ability of several proposed mechanisms to quantitatively replicate these changes. Based on careful calibration, the choices of successive generations of representative husband-and-wife households over the quantity and quality of their children, household production, and the extent of mother’s involvement in market-oriented production are simulated.
• Rising wages, declining mortality, a declining gender wage gap, and increased efficiency and public provision of schooling cannot, individually or in combination, reduce fertility or increase stocks of human capital to levels seen in the data. The best fit of the model to the data also involves: 1) a decreased tendency among parents to view potential earnings of children as the property of parents and, 2) rising consumption shares per dependent child.
• Greater attention should be given to the determinants of parental control of the work and earnings of children for this period.
• One contribution is the gathering of information and strategies necessary to establish an initial baseline, and the time paths for parameters and targets for this period beset with data limitations. A second contribution is identifying the contributions of various mechanisms toward reaching those calibration targets.

In matching theory of contracts the substitutes condition plays an essential role to ensure the existence of stable matchings. We study many-to-many matchings where groups of individuals, of size possibly greater than two, are matched to a set of institutions. Real-world examples include orphan brothers accepting an adoptive family conditional on all of them being included; hiring contracts that may only be chosen together; or a situation where a firm accepts to hire several workers only if they accept to work on different days (part-time jobs). We demonstrate by several examples that such extra conditions may alter the natural choice maps so that stable matchings cannot be obtained by applying the standard theorems. We overcome this difficulty by introducing a new construction of choice maps. We prove that they yield stable matchings if the construction respects an "anti-trust" rule on the supply side of the market.

In this paper, we use a Principal-Agent model (à la Holmström) to evaluate the economic impacts at imposing a tax on insurance payment resulting from an optimal contract in presence of moral hazard. We show that, in most cases, the tax generates a disincentive for the risk averse insured to provide sufficient effort at maintaining care, hence increasing insurance payments. As a result, company's profit and overall welfare decrease. Simulations show that this last result can be reversed only in cases where the cost of effort is low and the perceived insurance quality is very high.

In order to treat a natural schedule matching problem related with worker-firm matchings, we generalize some theorems of Baiou--Balinski and Alkan--Gale by applying a fixed point method of Fleiner.

We design and estimate a game theoretic congestion pricing mechanism in which the regulator aims at reducing urban traffic congestion by price discriminating travelers according to their Value Of Time (VOT). Travelers' preferences depend on their observable characteristics, on the endogenous amount of congestion anticipated, on their Marginal Utility (MU) of income and on some unobserved factors. Using a French household survey, we estimate the demand models to simulate different pricing mechanisms. We find that unobserved determinants of transportation demand are significant and are used to measure the anticipated time spent in traffic and the comfort of traveling: diverging from these expectations is felt as more discomfort than if no expectations were formed a-priori. However some of this discomfort is derived from travelers' marginal utility of income: the lost time in traffic is clearly "unpleasant" because of its opportunity cost. When the regulator and the transportation provider share common objectives, we show that a great welfare improvement can be achieved when implementing a homogenous pricing that accurately accounts for travelers VOT.

We relax the assumption of constancy of the marginal utility of income into a structural model of urban transportation with endogenous congestion. We examine the impact of unobserved heterogeneity in Marginal Utility (MU) of income on the determinants of travel by estimating the model using household survey data. We show that the value of time is no more statistically different across time slots and that the model is robust to all other results.

This paper considers the problem of identification and estimation in panel-data sample-selection models with a binary selection rule when the latent equations contain possibly predetermined variables, lags of the dependent variables, and unobserved individual effects. The selection equation contains lags of the dependent variables from both the latent and the selection equations as well as other possibly predetermined variables relative to the latent equations. We derive a set of conditional moment restrictions that are then exploited to construct a three-step sieve estimator for the parameters of the main equation including a nonparametric estimator of the sample-selection term. In the second step the unknown parameters of the selection equation are consistently estimated using a transformation approach in the spirit of Berkson's minimum chi-square sieve method and a first-step kernel estimator for the selection probability. This second-step estimator is of interest in its own right. It can be used to semiparametrically estimate a panel-data binary response model with a nonparametric individual specific effect without making any other distributional assumptions. We show that both estimators (second and third stage) are √n-consistent and asymptotically normal.

We estimate a structural model of congestion costs using a Bayesian Nash Equilibrium approach: the individual's preference for traveling depends on the anticipated level of congestion, which in turn is determined by travelers' decisions of mobility. The model is estimated using a French transportation household survey. Results confirm the presence of incomplete information and show that aversion to congestion is 6.6% lower during peak time than during off-peak time. A traveler's willingness to pay to save one minute in traffic is estimated at 0.73 euros during peak time and .25 euros during off-peak time.