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Campaigns, political mobility, and communication
(2011)Economics Working Paper SeriesWe present a model of elections in which interest group donations allow candidates to shift policy positions. We show that if donations were prohibited, then a unique equilibrium regarding the position choices of candidates would exist. With unrestricted financing of political campaigns two equilibria emerge, depending on whether a majority of interest groups runs to support the leftist or rightist candidate. The equilibria generate a ...Working Paper -
Long-term growth driven by a sequence of general purpose technologies
(2011)Economics Working Paper SeriesWorking Paper -
A dynamic cordon pricing scheme combining a macroscopic and an agent-based traffic models
(2011)Arbeitsberichte Verkehrs- und RaumplanungPricing is considered an effective management policy to reduce traffic congestion in transportation networks. This paper combines a macroscopic modeling of traffic congestion in urban networks with an agent-based simulator to study congestion pricing schemes. The macroscopic model, which has been tested with real data in previous studies, represents an accurate and robust approach to model the dynamics of congestion. The agent-based ...Working Paper -
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Dating Business Cycles in a Historical Perspective
(2011)KOF Working PapersIn this study we suggest a chronology of the classical business cycle in Switzerland. To this end we use two approaches: the approach of Artis et al. (2004) and an approach based on Markov-switching models (Hamilton, 1989). Our results show that similar conclusions can be reached by applying the two methodologies. Another result is that the chronology obtained displays high concordance with the chronology derived for the Euro Area by the ...Working Paper -
Endogenous enforcement of intellectual property, North-South trade, and growth
(2011)Economics Working Paper SeriesWhile most countries have harmonized intellectual property rights (IPR) legislation, the dispute about the optimal level of IPR-enforcement remains. This paper develops an endogenous growth framework with two open economies satisfying the classical North-South assumptions to study (a) IPR-enforcement in a decentralized game and (b) the desired globally-harmonized IPR-enforcement of the two regions. The results are compared to the ...Working Paper -
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Transport simulations
(2011)Arbeitsberichte Verkehrs- und RaumplanungHow does knowledge about a traffic system influence the behavior of people and the state of the traffic system they are acting in? The individual perception of the current traffic situation exerts an essential influence on the decision-making of road users and—in return—their behaviour effects the state of the traffic system. The key element of modeling traffic systems is to understand the impact of different personal knowledge levels ...Working Paper -
On the number of α-pivotal players
(2011)Economics Working Paper SeriesWe show that bounds like those of Al-Najjar and Smorodinsky (J. Econ. Theory, 2000) as well as of Gradwohl et al. (Math. Oper. Res., 2009) on the number of α-pivotal agents can be obtained by decomposition of variance. All these bounds have a similar asymptotic behaviour, up to constant fac- tors. Our bound is weaker than that of Al-Najjar and Smorodinsky, but we require only pairwise independent—rather than independent—types. Our result ...Working Paper -
Sustainable Climate Treaties
(2011)Economics Working Paper SeriesWe examine a global refunding scheme for mitigating climate change. Countries pay an initial fee into a global fund that is invested in long-run assets. In each period, part of the fund is distributed among the participating countries in relation to the emission reductions they have achieved in this period. We identify two possible types of sustainable treaty. A first-best sustainable treaty involves varying amounts of refunded wealth and ...Working Paper