Two trends have marked the politico-economic discussion in many industrialized countries in recent years. On the one hand, international production, workplace decentralization, shareholder orientation and generous manager remuneration have changed the face of firms in the primary economy. On the...

This paper integrates into public economics a biologically founded, stochastic process of individual ageing. The novel approach enables us to investigate the interaction between health and retirement policy in order to quantitatively characterize the optimal joint design of the social insurance...

This paper examines the role of the sociocultural background of students for choosing STEM fields in university. We combine rich survey data on university graduates in Switzerland with municipality level information from the census as well as nationwide elections and referenda to characterize a...

This paper examines the role of the sociocultural background of students for choosing STEM fields in university. We combine rich survey data on university graduates in Switzerland with municipality level information from the census as well as nationwide elections and referenda to characterize a...

In absence of randomized controlled experiments, identification is often aimed via instrumental variable (IV) strategies, typically two-stage least squares estimations. According to Bayes' rule, however, under a low ex ante probability that a hypothesis is true (e.g. that an excluded instrument...