We review economic arguments for using public policy to accelerate vaccine supply during a pandemic. Rapidly vaccinating a large share of the global population helps avoid economic, mortality, and social losses, which in the case of Covid-19 mounted into trillions of dollars. However,...

Concern exists that public funding of science is increasingly risk averse. Funders have addressed this concern by soliciting the submission of high-risk research to either regular or specially designed programs. Little evidence, however, has been gathered to examine the extent to which such...

The costs of low-carbon energy fell dramatically over the past decade, leading to rapid growth in its deployment. However, many challenges remain to deploy low-carbon energy at a scale necessary to meet net zero carbon emission targets. If net zero goals are to be met, developing complementary...

Does capital accumulation increase labor demand and wages? Neoclassical production functions, where capital and labor are q-complements, ensure that the answer is yes, so long as labor markets are competitive. This result critically depends on the assumption that capital accumulation does not...