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This paper studies the optimal fiscal treatment of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in an economy where individuals differ in their reproductive capacity (or fecundity) and in their wage. We find that the optimal ART tax policy varies with the postulated social welfare criterion. Utilitarianism redistributes only between individuals with unequal fecundity and wages but not between parents and childless individuals. To the opposite, ex post egalitarianism (which gives absolute priority to the worst-off in realized terms) redistributes from individuals with children toward those without children, and from individuals with high fecundity toward those with low fecundity, so as to compensate for both the monetary cost of ART and the disutility from involuntary childlessness resulting from unsuccessful ART investments. Under asymmetric information and in order to solve for the incentive problem, utilitarianism recommends to either tax or subsidize ART investments of low-fecundity-low-productivity individuals at the margin, depending on the degree of complementarity between fecundity and ART in the fertility technology. On the opposite, ex post egalitarianism always recommends marginal taxation of ART., (© 2024 The Authors. Health Economics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

We study the demand for Long Term Care (LTC hereafter) insurance in a setting where agents have state-dependent preferences over both a daily life consumption good and LTC expenditures. We assume that dependency creates a demand for LTC expenditures while decreasing the marginal utility of daily life consumption, for any given consumption level. Agents optimize over their consumption of both goods as well as over the amount of LTC insurance (LTCI). We first show that some agents optimally choose not to insure themselves, while no agent wishes to buy complete insurance, in accordance with the so-called LTCI puzzle. At equilibrium, the transfer received from the insurer covers only a fraction of the LTC expenditures. The demand for LTCI need not increase with income when preferences are non state-dependent or insurance is actuarially unfair. Also, preferences have to be state-dependent with no insurance bought to rationalize the empirical observation of a higher marginal utility at equilibrium when autonomous. Finally, focusing on iso-elastic preferences, we recover the empirical observation that health/LTC expenditures are not very sensitive to income, and we show that LTCI as a fraction of income should decrease with income and then become nil above a threshold., (© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

We investigated, based on self-determination theory (SDT), the impact of the functional meaning of monetary rewards on individuals' motivation and performance and further tested the role of the psychological needs as the underlying mechanism. In two experimental studies, we show that when presented in an autonomy-supportive way, rewards lead participants to experience greater intrinsic motivation, which leads them to perform better, than when monetary rewards are presented in a controlling way. This is mediated by greater psychological need satisfaction, indicating that through greater feelings of competence, autonomy, and relatedness, individuals experience greater intrinsic motivation for the task at hand. Our findings suggest that rewards can have a distinct effect on individuals' motivation and performance depending on whether they take on an autonomy-supportive or controlling meaning, thus providing empirical evidence for the theoretical and practical implications of SDT's concept of functional meaning of rewards. By highlighting the importance of this concept, this research contributes to our understanding of the effectiveness of such rewards in the workplace, suggesting that they can foster employee motivation and performance if organisations present them to employees in an autonomy-supportive way to convey an informational meaning and positively contribute to their psychological need stisfaction., (© 2019 International Union of Psychological Science.)