This book presents a number of ideas for drawing up new rules to improve the functioning of democracies. The first part examines ways of combining incentive contracts with democratic elections. Such a judicious combination can alleviate a wide range of political failures without impairing the...

This collection of essays honouring Dan Felsenthal and Moshé Machover reconsiders foundational aspects of the measurement of voting power. The specific case of voting power in two-tier systems - for instance the US system and the EU system - is analysed. Furthermore major power indices -...

Lukas Heim evaluates the performance of a price-level targeting rule compared to that of a standard inflation targeting rule. The comparison is based on a medium-scale DSGE model which has been estimated based on state-of-the-art Bayesian methods. The model for the Swiss economy is an expanded...

Investors are trying to generate excess returns through active investment strategies. Since the outbreak of the financial crisis, investors face a situation where increased risks are accompanied by falling key interest rates. An optimal portfolio in terms of risk and return becomes a perpetual...