We analyze the extent and effectiveness of electoral accountability and the problems related to keeping the politicians accountable. We illustrate the importance of developing incentive tools to discipline the incumbents. We propose "incentive pay" as an effective tool and we analyze its potentials and limitations. To assess the appropriate incentive schemes, we first explore the sources of (re)election incentives for politicians. To ...

Phylogenetic trees show the evolutionary relationships between individuals, populations or species and are generally built from genetic sequences. Phylodynamic inference focuses on reconstructing the underlying evolutionary processes from a phylogenetic tree, and can infer biologically meaningful parameters such as the rate of transmission of a pathogen or the rate of extinction of certain species. Its applications thus range from tracking ...

Quantum optics, the study of light at the level of its building blocks, has been one of the frontiers of science. The arena of quantum optics has been fruitful for investigations of a wide range of interesting questions, from those on the fundamental structures in driven dissipative systems to those on applications of quantum information processing and quantum communication. The first part of this thesis is concerned with one of the ...