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.

The era between the Civil War and WWII was one of revolutionary change within the American family. Family size continued its long-term decline and by the 1930s fertility was not much above contemporary levels (later rising during the baby boom). The schooling of older children expanded tremendously, as epitomized by the `high school movement.' Additionally, the proportion of married females' adulthood devoted to market-oriented activities increased, even as market-oriented activity performed at home declined. Horrific rates of infant and child mortality declined dramatically (with more gradual gains since). Thus, this interval contained the emergence of many important features of contempoary families. This paper considers these trends jointly through calibration of successive generations of representative husband and wife households who choose the quantity and quality of children, household production, and the extent of mother's involvement in market-oriented production. One important contribution is that standard explanations such as rising wages, declining mortality, skill-biased technological change, curriculum improvements during the high school movement, reductions in morbidity, and reduced time costs of children cannot in combination reduce fertility to observed levels or increase stocks of human capital to levels seen to be necessary by the calibrations. Instead, a rising relative preference for child quality over quantity is also required, leading to an increased share of potential family income devoted to child education, child consumption and an increase in time mother's investments in child quality. A second significant contribution is the gathering of information and strategies employed to present reasonable quantitative depictions of the behavior of cohorts over an interval in which significant data limitations are pervasive.

The relationship linking skills that are job specific to turnover decisions has long been considered an important issue in the economics of labor mobility. In this paper, we undertake a structural approach and extend the model of Miller (1984) to account for occupational experience as an additional determinant of turnover decision. We construct a dynamic index of individual decision regarding both jobs and occupational switches. More precisely, the return to a particular job (pecuniary and non-pecuniary) depends on both a job match specific parameter and an occupation specific parameter. This allows us to investigate whether the optimal individual decisions of switching jobs changes when accounting for transferable experience of the occupation, which in turn implies that the individual updates beliefs every time period. We use NLSY data to estimate the underlying structural parameters, giving an estimate of the career profile of individuals according to their socioeconomic characteristics.

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