We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties....

This paper studies whether and how banks’ technological innovations affect the bank lending channel of monetary policy transmission. We first provide a theoretical model in which banks' technological innovation relaxes firms’ earning-based borrowing constraints and thereby enlarges the...

We estimate the private value of Apple’s iPhone by observing abnormal stock market reactions to news announcements and patent publications related to the innovation. Our estimate of the lower bound on the market valuation of iPhone is fairly high, at minimum 30 billion U.S. (event day)...

We propose a Pareto-improving policy which reduces the overall wage tax burden in an economy with intergenerational trade in a fixed factor of production, here labelled as land. We analyse a second-best environment in which the government cannot resort to non-distortionary land taxes. Reducing...

We propose a Pareto-improving policy which reduces the overall wage taxburden in an economy with intergenerational trade in a fixed factor ofproduction, here labelled as land. We analyse a second-best environmentin which the government cannot resort to non-distortionary land taxes.Reducing the...

Government-run entities are often more labor-intensive than private companies, even with identical production technologies. This need not imply slack in the public sector, but may reflect a wage tax advantage, stemming from the fact that government entities (partly) pay their taxes to...

The draft treaty establishing a constitution for the European Union states that each member state may withdraw from the European Union following its own constitutional requirements. We argue that such a rule could lead into an increased use of threat of withdrawal to extract concessions in...

In their reply to our comment, García-Mainar and Montuenga-Gómez [García-Mainar, I., \& Montuenga-Gómez, V. M. (2009). A response to the comment on education returns of wage earners and self-employed workers. Economics of Education Review] did not address our fundamental criticism that they...

In a recent paper, García-Mainar and Montuenga-Gómez [García-Mainar, I. \& Montuenga-Gómez, V. M. (2005). Education returns of wage earners and self-employed workers: Portugal vs. Spain. Economics of Education Review, 24(2), 161-170] apply the generalized IV model of Hausman and Taylor to...

Recent research has documented that competent-looking political candidates do better in U.S. elections and that babyfaced individuals are generally perceived to be less competent than maturefaced individuals. Taken together, this suggests that babyfaced political candidates are perceived as less...