Kathia Bahloul Zekkari
Stock market bubbles and human capital

Stock price bubbles are often on productive assets. Their occurrence is often accompanied by credit booms. Incorporating these features in our paper which investigates the relationship between stock bubbles and human capital, we provide a theory of rational stock price bubbles in production economies with infinitely lived agents, in which firms invest in the general human capital of their workers in a frictional labor market and face credit constraints. Capital is not only an input for production, but also serves as collateral. Bubbles have a credit easing effect in that they relax collateral constraint and improve training investment efficiency. The collapse of bubbles tightens the credit constraints, causing firms to reduce training investment, which leads to an economic recession.

Armel Ngami
Healthcare or smartphones: Preferences-related health inequalities and economic growth

Along with the unprecedented improvements in health outcomes such as life expectancy in the last decades, it remains huge disparities in terms of longevity across countries, and even from individual to another. This may have consequences on social equity and on the economic development of a country. In this paper, we introduce heterogenous agents in an overlapping generations model with pollution and private/public health expenditures that affect the agents' length-of-life. Heterogeneity stems from households preferences for health, as a consequence of a minimum consumption requirement on other goods. Therefore, households do not choose the same level of private health expenditures and this generates health inequalities. In addition, the contribution to capital accumulation differs across individuals. However, an appropriate environmental policy may reduce health inequalities.