This paper considers the role of asymmetric information in a political agency theory of autocratic economic policy making. Within the context of a static game, we analyze the strategic interaction between an elite ruling class that sets policy and an imperfectly informed disenfranchised class,...

The conventional analysis of export subsidies implicitly assumes that foreign producers are prevented from selling their output in the nation with the export subsidy. This paper shows that there are 3 types of equilibria when there is no restriction on where firms can sell their output: the...

This paper examines the bargaining over how to combine lists of candidates between rounds of the 2004 and 2010 French regional elections. Regressions support the hypothesis that a party's fraction of a coalition's total seats won will be equal to that party's fraction of the total first-round...

The methodology used by theories to explain the size distribution of cities is contrived in that it takes an empirical fact and works backward to first obtain a reduced form of a model, then pushes this reduced form back to assumptions on primitives. The induced assumptions on consumer behavior,...

We consider the optimal nonlinear income taxation problem in a dynamic, stochastic environment when the government is sluggish in the sense that it cannot change the tax rule as uncertainty resolves. We show that the sluggish government cannot allow saving or borrowing regardless of the utility...

Agglomeration can be caused by asymmetric information and a locational signaling effect: The location choice of workers signals their productivity to potential employers. The cost of a signal is the cost of housing at that location. When workers' marginal willingness to pay for housing is...

Zipf’s law is one of the best-known empirical regularities in urban economics. 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 of an...

We examine the fine microstructure of commuting in a game-theoretic setting with a continuum of commuters. Commuters' home and work locations can be heterogeneous. A commuter transport network is exogenous. Traffic speed is determined by link capacity and by local congestion at a time and place...

We consider the optimal nonlinear income taxation problem in a dynamic, stochastic environment when the government cannot change the tax rule as uncertainty resolves. Due to such a stationarity constraint, our taxation problem is reduced to a static one over an expanded type space. We strengthen...

We consider the role of the nonlinear commuting cost function in determination of the equilibrium commuting pattern where all agents are mobile. Previous literature has considered only linear commuting cost, where in equilibrium, all workers are indifferent about their workplace location. We...