This memo discusses effects of COVID-19 on interest rates through the lens of global movements in the natural real interest rate. While government spending and public debt issuance are likely to cause a rise in r*, r* may decline due to precautionary behaviour. The net effect is uncertain.

We study why high-priced acquisitions of entrants by an incumbent do not necessarily stimulate more innovation and entry in an industry (like that of digital platforms) where customers face switching costs and enjoy network externalities. The prospect of an acquisition by the incumbent platform...

Commercial policies are often only efficient insofar as those harmed can be compensated. In practice, compensatory measures fall far short of distributive harm. We rationalize the paucity of compensation as a strategic effort on the part of elected officials to withhold information about effects...

Interest in the topic of well-being has burgeoned in recent years as the weaknesses of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita as a proxy for well-being have become more apparent. At the same time, the global economy has experienced a productivity slowdown. Since productivity growth is...

The modern Condorcet jury theorem states that under weak conditions, when voters have common interests, elections will aggregate information when the population is large, in any equilibrium. Here, we study the performance of large elections with population uncertainty. We find that the modern...

The ex-ante evaluation of policies using structural econometric models is based on estimated parameters as a stand-in for the truth. This practice ignores uncertainty in the counterfactual policy predictions of the model. We develop a generic approach that deals with parametric uncertainty using...