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....

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...

We study the effects of investor protection on the availability of external finance, entrepreneurship, and creation of new firms in an equilibrium search model of private capital markets. In addition to search frictions, we examine contract frictions, specifically interim and ex post moral...

Transparency regulation aims at reducing financial fragility by strengthening market discipline. There are however two elementary properties of banking that may render such regulation inefficient at best and detrimental at worst. First, an extensive financial safety net may eliminate the...

We aim at explaining why some consumers use only one medium when paying for their point-of-sale transactions, while others multihome and use many. Using data on young Finnish consumers, we find that one key determinant of multihoming behavior in the market for payment media is consumer...

Although it is widely acknowledged that the benefits of corporate governance reform could be substantial, systematic evidence on such reforms is scant. We both document and evaluate a contemporary corporate governance reform by constructing 18 measures of shareholder and creditor protection for...

Banking system is known to be vulnerable to self-fulfilling crises that are caused by depositors’ coordination failure. We show that transparency regulation may prevent systemic crises by eliminating the possibility of the coordination failure. In principle, transparency regulation in our...

We study the welfare effects of earnings testing flat-rate old-age benefits in a quantitative overlapping generations model with idiosyncratic labor income risk. In our model economy, even a moderate earnings testing reduces individuals' expected lifetime utility. Moreover, it also lowers the...

The draft treaty establishing a constitution for the European Union states that each member state may withdraw from the European Union following its own constitutional requirements. We argue that such a rule could lead into an increased use of threat of withdrawal to extract concessions in...

Both current and especially new member states of the European Union face incentives to distort the provision of public education away from internationally applicable education towards country-specific skills. This would mean educating too few engineers, economists and doctors, and too many...