The U.S. payments industry is in the process of developing ubiquitous, safe, faster electronic solutions for making a broad variety of business and personal payments. How this market for faster payments will evolve will be shaped by a range of economic forces, such as economies of scale and...

This paper raises the issue whether public policy should focus on minimizing unhappiness rather than maximizing happiness. Using a cross-sectional multi-country dataset with 57 thousand observations from 29 European countries, we show that unhappiness varies a great deal more across social...

This report argues that computer-intensive automation (CIAutomation) is likely to change the nature of work and manufacturing value creation in the emerging Platform Economy. The industrial and service changes based on low-cost computation, as they become more generalized, may reverse Robert...

What is the tenet upon which the public policy of lockdown by fiat experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic is based on? The work approaches this question about the rationale of the mandatory shelter-in-place policy as an interpersonal exchange of rights, but where the exchange occurs coercively...

The failure of public policies is ubiquitous. This paper ascribes this failure to the complex system nature of public policies. A key characteristic of complex systems is that they cannot be closely controlled or predicted. Yet the traditional approach to public policy is fundamentally based on...

The failure of public policies is ubiquitous. This paper ascribes this failure to the complex system nature of public policies. A key characteristic of complex systems is that they cannot be closely controlled or predicted. Yet the traditional approach to public policy is fundamentally based on...

This paper focuses on how education costs affect the political determination of public policy via individual decision-making. The paper extends the model in Hassler, Storesletten, and Zilibotti (2007, Journal of Economic Theory; henceforth HSZ) by generalizing the cost function of education and...

There are considerable gender inequalities in the labor market in Senegal. As Senegal will try a trade opening with the European Union in the framework of the EPA, we can raise the question of whether the new equilibrium of the economy will produce either a decrease or an increase in the gender...

We analyse all the major sources of direct and indirect R&D subsidies in Norway in the period 2002- 2013 and compare their effects on individual firms’ performance. Firms that received support are matched with a control group of firms that did not receive support using a combination of...