Zoning reform is a crucial tool for cities to adapt to contemporary challenges. However, its implementation remains challenging. Property owners, with a vested interest in the value of their neighborhoods, are sensitive to local developments and the potent ...
We study socio-political systems in representative democracies. Motivated by problems that affect the proper functioning of the system, we build computational methods to answer research questions regarding the phenomena occurring in them. For each phenomen ...
This paper presents a novel activity-based demand model that combines an optimisation framework for continuous temporal scheduling decisions (i.e. activity timings and durations) with traditional discrete choice models for non-temporal choice dimensions (i ...
We build a dynamic agency model in which the agent controls both current earnings via short-term investment and firm growth via long-term investment. Under the optimal contract, agency conflicts can induce short- and long-term investment levels beyond firs ...
Integrating the concept of ecosystem services (ES) into spatial planning is an opportunity to make land use and management choices that maximize the delivery of multiple ES. The assessment of social demand can be useful for the identification of priority a ...
We use a dynamic model of financing decisions to measure agency conflicts for a large panel of 12,652 firms from 14 countries. Our estimates show that agency conflicts are large and vary significantly across firms and countries. Differences in agency confl ...
This thesis contains four chapters, each of which utilizes new or unusual data sources to analyze a different area of financial economics. In the first chapter, I construct a novel dataset linking individual bankers to large borrowers in the U.S. syndicate ...
In connection with the ongoing disappearance of glaciers in cold mountains, a great number of new lakes come into existence. The sites and approximate formation time of such potential new lakes can be realistically modelled. This provides an important know ...
Privacy is defined as the right to control, edit, manage, and delete information about oneself and decide when, how, and to what extent this information is communicated to others. Therefore, every person should ideally be empowered to manage and protect hi ...
The topic of the here presented work is the influence of firms on climate policy. This thesis analyses the impact of firms’ influence on the acceptance of climate policy, its effectiveness, and implementation. Hereby, the mediation of private interest is u ...
Web 2.0 portals have made content generation easier than ever with millions of users contributing news stories in form of posts in weblogs or short textual snippets as in Twitter. Efficient and effective filtering solutions are key to allow users stay tune ...
We present the Input Acceptance of Transactional Memory (TM). Despite the large interest for performance of TMs, no existing research work has investigated the impact of solving a conflict that does not need to be solved. Traditional solutions for a TM to ...
Business interest associations play an important role in the decision making process of climate policy. In 2009, the revision of the Swiss CO2 law for designing post-2012 climate policy is at stake. This paper analyzes the positions and arguments of the Sw ...
This paper analyzes the relation between agency conflicts and risk management. In contrast to previous contributions, our analysis incorporates not only stockholder-debtholder conflicts but also manager – stockholder conflicts. We show that the costs of bo ...
