In reaction to the monetary turmoil created by the financial crisis of September 2008, both legislative and constitutional reforms have been proposed in different Countries to introduce Commodity Money longside existing National Fiat Currency. A thorough evaluation of the Economic consequences...

Democracy is defined by two core tenets: voice and pluralism. Within these constraints, a wide variety of regime types can be designed. We show that the only new, untested form of democracy is when every citizen is governed by the political party of his/her choice. Multiple full-fledged...

We introduce a model of the economy as a social network. Two agents are linked to the extent that they transact with each other. This generates well-defined topological notions of location, neighborhood and closeness. We investigate the implications of our model for monetary economics. When a...

Democracy is defined by two core tenets: voice and pluralism. Within these constraints, a wide variety of regime types can be designed. We show that the only new, untested form of democracy is when every citizen is governed by the political party of his/her choice. Multiple full-edged...

Markowitz portfolio selection is a cornerstone in finance, both in academia and in the industry. Most academic studies either ignore transaction costs or account for them in a way that is both unrealistic and suboptimal by (i) assuming transaction costs to be constant across stocks and (ii)...

This paper estimates the curvature of the Earth, defined as one over its radius, without using any physics. The orthodox model is that the Earth is nearly spherical with a curvature of Û/20, 000 km. By contrast, the heterodox flat-Earth model stipulates a curvature of zero. Abstracting from the...

Markowitz portfolio selection is a cornerstone in finance, in academia as well as in the industry. Most academic studies either ignore transaction costs or account for them in a way that is both unrealistic and suboptimal by (i) assuming transaction costs to be constant across stocks and (ii)...

Applied researchers often test for the difference of the variance of two investment strategies;in particular, when the investment strategies under consideration aim to implementthe global minimum variance portfolio. A popular tool to this end is the F-test for theequality of variances....