What is the right balance among policy interventions in order to ensure economic growth over the long run when an epidemic causes heavy mortality among young adults? We argue that, in general, policies to combat the disease and promote education must be concentrated, in certain ways, on some...

We study the formation of human capital and its transmission across generations when a society is assailed by an epidemic disease such as AIDS. We establish that the disease can severely retard economic growth, even to the point of leading to an economic collapse. We also show that the epidemic...

The election mechanism has difficulties in selecting the most able candidates and deselecting less able ones. In a simple model we show that the power of elections as a selection and incentive device can be improved by requiring higher vote thresholds than 50% for incumbents. A higher vote...

We suggest a development-compatible refunding system designed to mitigate climate change. Industrial countries pay an initial fee into a global fund. Each country chooses its national carbon tax. Part of the global fund is refunded to developing and industrial countries, in proportion to the...

We develop a model that incorporates salient features of growth in modern economies. We combine the expanding-variety growth model through horizontal innovations with a hierarchy of basic and applied research. The former extends the knowledge base, while the latter commercializes it. Two-way...

Democratic processes may not take the welfare of future generations sufficiently into account and thus may not achieve sustainability. We show that the dual democratic mechanism – rejection/support rewards (RSRs) for politicians and elections – can achieve sustainability. RSRs stipulate that...

We examine wage bargaining in a two-sector economy when the employers and labour unions in each sector are not always aware of all the general equilibrium feedback effects. We show analytically that if agents only consider labour demand effects, low real wages and low unemployment are the...

We propose a blueprint for an international emission permit market such as the EU trading scheme. Each country decides on the amount of permits it wants to offer. A fraction of these permits is grandfathered, the remainder is auctioned. Revenues from the auction are collected in a global fund...

We develop democratic mechanisms where individual utilities are not observable by other people at the legislative stage. We show that an appropriate combination of three rules can yield efficient provision of public projects: first, flexible and double majority rules where the size of the...

To examine the impact of globalization on managerial compensation, we consider a matching model where a number of firms compete both in the product market and in the managerial market. We show that globalization, that is, the simultaneous integration of product markets and managerial pools,...