We develop a product market theory explaining why firms invest in general training of their workers and managers. We consider a model where firms first decide whether to invest in general human capital, then make wage offers for the trained employees in the market and finally engage in product...

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Most of the work in the field of competition between jurisdictions for the attraction of a large plant focuses on financial offers, bids or tax holidays. In this paper we add to the competition game an initial stage in which jurisdictions can invest in an infrastructure capital to enhance their...

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A striking feature of US states convergence is the link between the spatial speed of convergence and the aggregate growth rate: fast aggregate growth induces a reduction in regional inequalities. This paper uses a neoclassical growth framework with integrated economies in order to capture this...

In this paper, we reconsider the irreversibility theory in an non-Bayesian framework. First, we propose three definitions in order to make the difference between the effects of the irreversibilities and of the information which were mixed in the standard definition of the "irreversibility...

A key question concerning social norms is whether norms that are bad for its members can survive. This paper argues that when identical workers have the outside option to join a competing firm with a different norm, good norms can exist only in the presence of bad norms. With non contractible...

Young women go to prosperous areas, leaving economically backward places with a deficit of fertile women. This phenomenon is common throughout the developed world. The proposed reason is that women have two sources of income: men and work, and both the good men and the good jobs tend to be in...

Cheap talk games have been widely used to analyze situations in which a policy maker needs expert advice. In previous work, agent uncertainty has almost always been modeled using a single-dimensional state variable. In this paper we prove that the dimensionality of the uncertain variable has an...

Detailed transaction and price data from 769 Chinese state-owned enterprises reveal that corruption --- official diversion of under-priced in-plan industrial goods to the market --- was pervasive in China between 1980 and 1989. More important, corruption has a significant impact on the...