Our novel approach to modeling monopolistic competition with heterogeneous firms and consumers involves spatial product differentiation. Space can be interpreted either as a geographical space or as a space of characteristics of a differentiated good. In addition to price setting, each firm also...

There is substantial empirical evidence showing that peer effects matter in many activities. The workhorse model in empirical work on peer effects is the linear-in-means (LIM) model, whereby it is assumed that agents are linearly affected by the mean action of their peers. We develop a new...

We propose a general model of monopolistic competition, which encompasses existing models while being flexible enough to take into account new demand and competition features. Using the concept of Frechet differentiability, we determine a general demand system. The basic tool we use to study the...

We combine spatial and monopolistic competition to study market interactions between downtown retailers and an outlying shopping mall. Consumers shop at either marketplace or at both, and buy each variety in volume. The market solution stems from the interplay between the market expansion...

We consider an empirical model in which individuals choose jointly their destination country and occupational choice. We plan to estimate this model using Ukrainian micro-data. The main results (to be yet obtained) will shed light on joint determinants of workers' migration decisions and their...

In this paper, we undertake an in-depth inquiry into the nature of sharing externalities, and study how they affect the market outcome. We show that the key thing for understanding sharing externalities is the interplay between two forces: the specialization/complexity effect, on the one hand,...

We develop a general equilibrium model of monopolistic competition with a traded and a non-traded sector. Using a broad class of homothetic preferences—that generate variable markups, display a simple behavior of their elasticity of substitution, and nest the ces as a limiting case—we show...

We develop a theoretical model in which technology adoption decisions are based on the information received from others about the quality of a new technology and on their risk attitudes. We test the predictions of this model using a randomized field experiment in Bangladesh. We show that the...

Although the linear-in-means model is the workhorse model in empirical work on peer effects, its theoretical properties are understudied. In this study, we develop a social-norm model that provides a micro foundation of the linear-in-means model and investigate its properties. We show that...

Our novel approach to modeling monopolistic competition with heterogeneous consumers involves a space of characteristics of a differentiated good (consumers' ideal points), alike Hotelling (1929). Firms have heterogeneous costs à la Melitz (2003). In addition to price setting, each firm also...