We study the role of unemployment in the context of the endogeneous formation of a monocentric city in which firms set efficiency wages to deter shirking. We first show that, in equilibrium, the employed locate at the vicinity of the city-center, the unemployed reside at the city-edge and firms...

Monotonicity of the equilibrium bidding strategy is a key property of structural auction models. Traditional nonparametric estimators provide a flexible means of uncovering salient features of auction data, but do not formally impose the monotonicity assumption that is inherent in the models...

Monotonicity of the equilibrium bidding strategy is a key property of structural auction models. Traditional nonparametric estimators provide a flexible means of uncovering salient features of auction data, but do not formally impose the monotonicity assumption that is inherent in the models...

In settings where there is imperfect information about an underlying state of nature, but where inferences are made sequentially and are publicly observable, information cascades can lead to rational herding. Cascade phenomena may be seen in a variety of areas including technology adoption,...

The aim of this paper is to explore the structure of cities as a function of labor differentiation, gains to trade, a fixed cost for constructing the transportation network, a variable cost of commodity transport, and the commuting costs of consumers. Firms use different types of labor to...

The paper addresses mainly three questions. One, do workers tend to be employed by employers of the same ethnic group; two, what is the structure of the equilibrium wage contract, and three, do more ethnically homogeneous labor markets tend to have different labor contracts than more ethnically...

Heterogeneous firms facing demand-induced price fluctuations imperfectly compete for heterogeneous workers. It is shown that unemployment may arise in equilibrium because of the combination of uncertainty on product price and mismatch between workers’ skills and firms’ job requirements.

We propose a dynamic efficiency wage model with learning by doing. By taking into account the change inthe stock of workers’ knowledge, firms set efficiency wages such that the effort–wage elasticity is not in general equal to one.

Recent theoretical work has examined the spatial distribution of unemployment using the efficiency wage model as the mechanism by which unemployment arises in the urban economy. This paper extends the standard efficiency wage model in order to allow for behavioral substitution between leisure...

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,...