A prominent feature of economic geography in America is the positive correlation amongst local incomes, housing costs and city population. This paper embeds a “black box” agglomeration economy within a more neoclassical general equilibrium model of local wages, rents and population to assess...

An agent who is near-rational in the sense of Akerlof and Yellen makes a slight mistake which has only a first-order effect ohnhis own utility. If he is constrained by a participation constraint on another party, as in a principal-agent relationship, the result only holds when the agent is...

We study pair-wise decentralized trade in dynamic markets with homogeneous, non-atomic, buyers and sellers that wish to exchange one unit. Pairs of traders are randomly matched and bargaining a price under rules that offer the freedom to quit the match at any time. Market equilbria, prices and...

We introduce a model of an local public goods economy with a continuum of agents and jurisdictions with finite population. Under an especially mild condition of boundedness of per capita payoffs we show nonemptiness of the core of the economy. We then demonstrate that the equal treatment core...

This study demonstrates how constrained efficient allocations can arise endogenously as equilibria in an economy with a limited ability to enforce contracts and with private agents behaving competitively, taking a set of taxes as given. The taxes in this economy limit risk-sharing and arise in...

The increasing returns revolution in trade is incomplete in an important respect there exists no compelling empirical demonstration of the role of increasing returns in determining production and trade structure. One reason is that trade patterns of the canonical increasing returns models are a...

We provide the reader with a qualitative summary of the main ideas from econophysics and finance theory, starting with a thorough criticism of the standard ideas taught in typical economics textbooks. The emphasis is on the Galilean or physicists' approach to market synamics, as opposed to the...

The American economy has undergone a dramatic structural change in the first decade of the 21st Century. The real-economy causes of this transformation, and their expression via the real estate market and its financial derivatives’ market, and their final manifestation in world financial...

Interest in thermodynamic analogies in economics is older than the idea of von Neumann to look for market entropy in liquidity, advice that was not taken in any thermodynamic analogy presented so far in the literature. In this paper we go further and use a standard strategy from trading theory...

General Equilibrium Theory in econometrics is based on the vague notion of utility. Prices, dynamics, and market equilibria are supposed to be derived from utility. Utility is sometimes treated like a potential, other times like a Lagrangian. Illegal assumptions of integrability of actions and...