Lifelong learning is often promoted in ageing societies, but little is known about its returns or governments' ability to advance it. This paper evaluates the effects of a large-scale randomized field experiment issuing vouchers for adult education in Switzerland. We find no significant average...

The employability of an aging population in a world of continuous and biased technical change is top of the political agenda. Due to endogenous human capital depreciation the effective retirement age is often below statutory retirement age resulting in permanent non-employability of older...

The likely extension of the euro area has triggered a debate on the organization of the ECB, in particular on the apparent mismatch between relative economic size and voting rights in the Council. We present a simple model of optimal representation in a federal central bank addressing this...

This paper analyzes the a priori influence of the European Parliament (EP) and the Council of Ministers (CM) on legislation of the European Union adopted under its codecision procedure. In contrast to studies which use conventional power indices, both institutions are assumed to act...

We analyze motivations for, and possible alternatives to, the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP). With regard to the former, we identify domestic policy failures and various cross-country spillover effects; with regard to the latter, we contrast an economic-theory" perspective on optimal corrective...

In this paper we investigate the effects of central bank interventions (CBI) in a noise trading model with chartists and fundamentalists. We first estimate a model in which chartists extrapolate past returns and fundamentalists forecast a mean reverting dynamics of the exchange rate towards a...

Ever since its inception EMU has been subject to controversy. The fiscal policy rules embedded in the Treaty on European Union, and clarified in the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), are probably the most contentious. The SGP is being accused of being too rigid and of forcing pro-cyclicality in...

This paper analyses the direct and indirect trade volume and trade cost effects of uncertainty on international trade and economic welfare using a structural gravity framework for a panel of 97 developed and developing countries from 2000 to 2018. Our results suggest that an increase in...

This paper examines the usefulness of shadow rates to measure the monetary policy stance by comparing them to the official policy rates and those implied by three types of Taylor rules in both inflation targeting countries (the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and others that have only...