This paper studies the extent to which diffusion approximations provide a reliable guide to equilibrium selection results in finite games. It is shown that they do for a class of finite games with weak learning provided that limits are taken in a certain order. The paper also shows that making...

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This paper studies the recent trends in the spatial distribution of economic activity in the United States. Using county-level employment data for 13 sectors - which cover the entire economy - we apply semi-parametric techniques to estimate how agglomeration and congestion effects have changed...

The paper is concerned with foreign investment in developing countries and the incentives offered to attract that investment in relation to the use of a possible future multilateral investment agreement as a commitment device over incentive levels. The existing literature has identified two...

A rational player will never play a strictly dominated strategy. It might be tempting therefore to eliminate such strategies from any subsequent analysis. However, if equilibrium selection is an issue it may be wrong to do so. In models of adaptive learning with state-independence mutations,...

It is common to model costs of carrying out strategies in games in relation to the complexity, in some sense, of the strategies. We show a particularly general definition of complexity for this purpose, one that subsumes many alternatives as special cases. We explore how this definition can be...

Jones (1971) examines a three-factor two-good model under the assumption that two of the factors are specific to one sector (a different sector for each such factor). In this paper that specification is weakened, so that only one sector (agriculture) has a specific factor (land). When land is a...

It is widely thought that incomes risks can be shared by trading in financial assets. But financial assets typically carry some risk idiosyncratic to them, hence, disposing incomes risk using financial assets will involve buying into the inherent idiosyncratic risk. However, standard theory...

Worksharing is considered by many as a promising public policy to reduce unemployment. In this paper we present a review of the most pertinent theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature on worksharing. In addition, we also provide new empirical evidence on this issue, by a cross...

This paper considers the practical problem of distributing a fixed budget for poverty alleviation to a population whose poverty status is not directly observable. Some information on the relationship between poverty status and a number of observable and verifiable characteristics is assumed to...