Contenu du sommaire : Varia

Unemployment insurance and family status This article surveys the literature studying the links between unemployment and the family. First, we focus on the interactions between family status and unemployment risks. Being in a couple rather than single, as the number of children influence unemployment duration. In turn, unemployment impacts couple formation and dissolution, as the decision to have children and the timing of births. We then investigate the mutual insurance role against labour income risks played by the spouses. We insist on the limited insurance provided by the spouses due to limited commitment, and the particularly high default risk in bad times for the couple. The latter risk is all the more important than unemployment alters bargaining powers inside the couple. Finally, this leads us to investigate the institutional framework aimed at protecting individuals/ families against labour market hazards (Unemployment Insurance and Employment Protection Legislation) and its interactions with the family. It turns out that many countries provide more Employment Protection to those having a family. However, Unemployment Insurance depends very little on family status, once taxes and transfers are taken into account.

An interpretive Account of Logical Aggregation Theory
Judgment aggregation theory, or rather, as we conceive of it here, logical aggregation theory generalizes social choice theory by having the aggregation rule bear on judgments of all kinds whatever, and not barely judgments of preference. It derives from Kornhauser and Sager's doctrinal paradox and Pettit's discursive dilemma, two problems that we restate by emphasizing their conceptual differences. Henceforth, we follow the main technical advances of the theory, from the first impossibility theorem proved by List and Pettit to the completely general results of Dietrich and Mongin. We stress the collective achievement of the canonical theorem – by Dietrich and List, Dokow and Holzman, Nehring and Puppe – which provided the theory with a specific method of analysis : it consists in mathematically characterizing the impossibility agendas of a given aggregator – i.e., the sets of propositions such that no collective judgment function exists with a certain list of axiomatic properties. The presentation is unified here by the use of formal logic, for which we claim relevance at every step, and by the above-mentioned distinction between the doctrinal paradox and the discursive dilemma, which we reelaborate upon technically.

International cooperation by mediation: The power of the chair Global issues such as climate change, depletion of the ozone layer and bio-diversity loss call for a coordination of national environmental policies. In this paper, we focus on the conditions for mediation to promote cooperation. We consider two coalitions of countries that participate in an international negotiation. By participating, they receive an advice, a draft agreement from the chairman in charge of the negotiations. This draft sets out a distribution of the burdens and, according to the cost and benefit functions, coalitions may have an interest in complying with it or not. When there is at least one draft agreement such that countries have no incentives to deviate from the recommendation, we say that mediation by the chairman is able to disentangle coordination failure. We focus on cases where it does, and discuss the configurations that render mediation, a feasible coordination device to promote international environmental cooperation.

The information exchanged under REACH: A cost-sharing analysis This article addresses the question of data-sharing mechanisms under REACH. The members of an information exchange forum have to share their data. This exchange requires the adoption of a compensation scheme : the owner of a data receives a monetary compensation in return for the access to his/her data. We are interested in the choice of a compensation scheme that would be fair for all participants. In order to answer this question, the exchange of information is modeled as in Dehez and Tellone [2010]. We list a collection of axioms for the compensation schemes. Various combinations of these axioms characterize several compensation schemes. Some of them coincide with well-known solutions of an associated cooperative game with transferable utility.

Taxation and Economic Calculation in mid-19th Century France In the middle of the 19th century three French mathematical economists, Jules Dupuit, Augustin Cournot and Gustave Fauveau, develop analyses of taxation which strongly dissent from these of their liberal contemporaries. By trying to give rational principles to public policies, these three authors each proposed a formalized study of taxation, what did no other European economist of that time. They provided different answers to the same questions raised by the French liberal economists ; they mathematically proved that progressive and indirect taxes, which were firmly rejected by their contemporaries, could comply with efficiency and justice.