This thesis is in two parts. The first part is an extensive literature survey that summarizes and synthesizes several works on bureaucracy from sociology, business administration, and political science as well as economics, prominently featuring selections from Herbert Simon, Anthony Downs,...

This paper develops a new approach for measuring the stringency of a major form of land-use regulation, building-height restrictions, and it applies the method to an extraordinary dataset of land-lease transactions from China. Our theory shows that the elasticity of land price with respect to...

This paper adds a land market to a standard Harris-Todaro framework. In the standard model, the equilibrating force that limits rural-urban migration is a decline in the probability of formal employment, which follows from enlargement of the informal sector. The key insight of the present paper,...

The idea that there is a spatial dimension to the poor labor market outcomes of urban black residents has been understood for approximately thirty years. It was first put forth in the economic literature by Kain (1968) and has generated a consistent stream of discussion. Recently, in light of...