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...

We develop a dynamic model of intermediate goods trade in which the pattern and the extent of intermediate goods trade are endogenous. We consider a small open economy whose final good production employs an endogenous array of intermediate goods, from low technology (high cost) to high...

Power laws in productivity and firm size are well-documented empirical regularities. As they are upper right-tail phenomena, this paper shows that assuming asymptotic power functions for various model primitives (such as demand and firm heterogeneity) are sufficient for matching these...

Rent-seeking is defined as exercising privileges or expending resources in order to obtain uncompensated gain by redistributing the wealth of others without reciprocating any benefits back to society through wealth creation. This paper pioneers in analyzing the agglomeration of rent-seeking...

This paper examines the impact of intellectual property rights (IPR) enforcement on multinationals' choice of input suppliers and industry profits in a host economy. The framework consists of suppliers with heterogeneous capabilities who must engage in a relation-specific investment to customize...

This paper begins with a survey of the literature on the political economy approaches to labor income taxation. We focus on recent progress made by examining in detail the specific properties of non-linear taxes derived in the context of voting. Next, we present new results on the existence of...

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...

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 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...

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...