This paper presents a model of school choice with peer effects and scale economies within schools. Parents` perception of school quality depends on resources and on the characteristics of the student body. A network of local schools of uniform quality will be optimal, even though different...

We examine some of the factors that might influence the quality of information produced in discussion groups on the internet, such as USENET and the WELL. In particular, we look at the impact of various different pricing structures, and compare regimes in which anonymity is enforced with regimes...

A Toy Model is a simple economic model, with no claims to generality. These models are usually constructed for some specific purpose. That was the origin of the famous trade model, the Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson (HOS) Model, originally constructed to model Nineteenth Century transatlantic trade....

This paper gives a unified and simple treatment of three related questions in the demand theory of the weak axiom: (i) Is there an elementary, i.e., non-fixed point theoretic, proof of equilibrium existence when the excess demand function of an economy satisfies the weak axiom? (ii) What...

Trade unions have been successful in compressing the wage distribution but not in influencing the share of national income going to labour. This paper claims that a compressed wage distribution provides insurance in the same way that the tax and benefit system does and thus may be...

The conventional Sargan (1958)/Hansen (1982) test of overidentifying restrictions and the Tilting Parameter test of Imbens, Spady and Johnson (1998) are compared in the context of the AR(1) dynamic panel data model using Monte Carlo experiments. Interestingly, the size properties of the former...

Three experiments on utility interdependence are discussed. Subjects receive money by betting and possibly by arbitrary assignments. They can then pay to reduce and, possibly, redistribute the steal money; in one case, only the decisions of a randomly determined dictator are implemented. The...

This paper examines the impact of a major change in dividend taxation introduced in the UK in July 1997. The reform was structured in such a way that the immediate impact fell almost entirely on the largest investor class in the UK, namely pension funds. We analyse the behaviour of share prices...

If agent`s (subjective) beliefs are ambiguous then the beliefs may not be represented by a unique probability distribution in the standard Bayesian fashion but instead by a set of probabilities. Roughly put, an ambiguity averse decision maker evaluates an act by the minimum expected value that...

This paper develops an asymmetric price setting oligopoly model of store opening and closure decisions in the UK supermarket industry which is estimated using a survey of consumer choices and a dataset of store characteristics. The model is used to examine the strategic local entry and exit...