Is the paradise of effortless communication the ideal environment for knowledge creation? Or, can the development of local culture in regions raise knowledge productivity compared to a single region with a unitary culture? In other words, can a real technological increase in the cost of...

This paper demonstrates that a pollution tax with a fixed cost component may lead, by itself, to segregation between clean and dirty firms without heterogeneous preferences or increasing returns. We construct a simple model with two locations and two industries (clean and dirty) where pollution...

This paper presents a new framework for modeling the fine microstructure of knowledge creation dynamics. Our focus is on the creation of working nowledge used in innovation, for example, the knowledge used by a researcher in the economics profession. The framework has been developed to address...

Zipf's law is one of the best-known empirical regularities of the city-size distribution. There is extensive research on the subject, where each city is treated symmetrically in terms of the cost of transactions with other cities. Recent developments in network theory facilitate the examination...

The empirical regularity known as Zipf’s law or the rank-size rule has motivated development of a theoretical literature to explain it. We examine the assumptions on consumer behavior, particularly about their inability to insure against the city-level productivity shocks, implicitly used in...

Conventional wisdom tells us that with no market failure and local non-satiation of preferences, the core is at least as large as the collection of competitive equilibrium allocations.We con.rm this for a standard model featuring land. Next we consider the public land ownership version of the...

There have been long-term trends of urbanization and sustained growth across developed and developing countries over the past two centuries. Not only have more cities formed, but the leading metropolises have grown larger, with a number of peripheral subcenters developing over time. Conventional...