This paper studies the formation of human capital and its transmission across generations when premature adult mortality is a salient feature of the demographic landscape, either permanently or in the form of a long-period wave that follows the outbreak of an epidemic. We establish several...

We integrate banks and the coexistence of bank and bond financing into an otherwise standard New Keynesian framework. There are two policy-makers: a central banker, who can decide on short-term nominal interest rates, and a macroprudential policy-maker, who can vary aggregate capital...

What is the economic rationale for investing in science? Based on an open economy model of creative destruction, we characterize four key factors of optimal investment in basic research: the stage of economic development, the strength of the manufacturing base, the degree of openness, and the...

Innovation clusters combining public and private effort to develop breakthrough technologies promise greater technological advances to slow down climate change. We use a multi-country model with emissions permit trade to examine how international climate policy can incentivize countries to...

We study how to efficiently motivate policy-makers to solve political multitask problems. Political multi-task problems typically have outcomes that are difficult to measure. Moreover, there are conflicts among citizens about optimal policies and the agents have the power to tax the citizens to...

We study the political economy of bank capital regulation from a positive and normative perspective. In a general equilibrium setting, capital requirements and lobbying contributions are determined as the outcome of bargaining between banks and politicians. We show that bankers and politicians...

Decoy ballots do not count in election outcomes, but otherwise they are indistinguishable from real ballots. By means of a game-theoretical model, we show that decoy ballots may not provide effective protection against a malevolent adversary trying to buy real ballots. If the citizenry is...

We analyze Assessment Voting, a new two-round voting procedure that can be applied to binary decisions in democratic societies. In the first round, a randomly-selected number of citizens cast their vote on one of the two alternatives at hand, thereby irrevocably exercising their right to vote....

We develop a model to rationalize and examine so-called "research bubbles", i.e. research activities based on overoptimistic beliefs about the impact of this research on the economy. Research bubbles occur when researchers selfselect into research activities and the government aggregates the...

We suggest a blueprint for an eFranc as a possible complement for the Swiss monetary system to ensure the long-term stability of its money. An eFranc is a non-interest-bearing digital form of the legal tender available to the public. The public can convert banknotes or part of its bank deposits...