We introduce social interactions into the Schelling model of residential choice. These social interactions take the form of a Prisoner's Dilemma game played with neighbors. First, we study the Schelling model over a wide range of utility functions and then proceed to study a spatial Prisoner's...

Midtown Manhattan is the largest business district in the country. Yet only a few miles to the south is another district centered at Wall Street. This paper aims to understand when and why midtown emerged. We have created a new data set from historical New York City directories that provide the...

There is a large literature in economics and elsewhere on the emergence and evolution of cooperation in the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma. Recently this literature has expanded to include cooperation in spatial prisoner dilemma games where agents play only with local neighbors in a specified...

Skyscrapers in Manhattan need to be anchored to bedrock to prevent (possibly uneven) settling. This can potentially increase construction costs if the bedrock lies deep below the surface. The conventional wisdom holds that Manhattan developed two business centers--downtown and midtown--because...

Skyscrapers in Manhattan must be anchored to bedrock to prevent (possibly uneven) settling; this can potentially increase construction costs if the bedrock lies deep below the surface. The conventional wisdom holds that Manhattan developed two business centers—downtown and...

Agent-based economics, and more generally agent-based social sciences, have been around in various forms for over 30 years. The advent of higher speed computing and new tools for the computational learning fields led to a major increase in activity in the early 1990s through today. Research...

The humanitarian sector has gone through a major shift toward injection of cash into vulnerable communities as its core modality. On this trajectory toward direct currency injection, something new has happened: namely the empowerment of communities to create their own local currencies, a tool...

Despite globalization, liberalized trade and growing global income, billions of people are underemployed and condemned to life-long poverty. Over two thirds of the world’s poor reside in rural regions. Inequality in living standards between developed and developing regions remains a major...

Do government budget deficits raise interest rates and thus “crowd out” private investment? This question has been the topic of a multitude of empirical studies, which proposed to evaluate the impact of financing government activity. We survey the theory and some empirical results....

This proposal argues in favor of commodity price stabilization via international commodity buffer stocks and the tying of these stocks to the creation of a new international reserve currency. Financing commodity buffer stocks through the issuance of an international reserve makes commodity price...