We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties....

We study the optimal duration of contracts in a principal-agent framework with both moral hazard and adverse selection. Agents decide on a contract-specific and non-verifiable investment. Incentive compatibility requires that initial contracts, which serve to screen the ability of newly hired...

Economic interest in innovation policy largely arises from the fundamental importance of innovation to social welfare and from well-known inefficiencies in innovation in a competitive market environment. As a result, a wide variety of public innovation policies are used in practice. This report...