Redlining is the practice of restricting or denying access to services in a spatially defined area. Typically, redlining refers to the practice of restricting access to financial service products, such as mortgages, to residents of minority areas. The term arose from urban activists in Chicago...

A bidding ring is a collection of bidders who collude in an auction in order to gain greater surplus by depressing competition. This entry describes some typical bidding rings and provides an introduction to the related theoretical and empirical literature.

Although economists have sought to link the health behaviours or outcomes of socially connected individuals for several decades, there has been a recent resurgence in interest and expansion in empirical techniques. Studies that attempt to estimate social network effects in health decisions face...

Economists have studied for a long time how decision-makers allocate scarce resources. The recent literature on rational inattention studies how decision-makers allocate the scarce resource attention. The idea is that decision-makers have a limited amount of attention and have to decide how to...

Multiple testing refers to any instance that involves the simultaneous testing of more than one hypothesis. If decisions about the individual hypotheses are based on the unadjusted marginal p-values, then there is typically a large probability that some of the true null hypotheses will be...

No trade theorems represent a class of results showing that, under certain conditions, trade in asset markets between rational agents cannot be explained on the basis of differences in information alone. They pose a challenge to provide a theoretical justification of the high trade volumes...

Peter Diamond has made fundamental contributions to economic theory over a wide range of areas including search theory and its implications for unemployment (for which he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize), optimal taxation, which he pioneered with James Mirrlees, incomplete markets and their...

This article examines the strategies, successes and failures of economic development in Latin America since 1870. We divide the analysis into four key development phases: primary export-led growth (1870–1929), import substitution industrialisation (1945–82), debt crisis (1980s) and...

The economics of health behaviours concerns decisions about smoking, diet and exercise, drinking alcohol, and other consumer choices with important health consequences. The neoclassical model of the consumer and its extensions provide the theoretical framework for most economic research on...

What precisely is a Single Market, how it has been designed in the case of the European Union (e.g. in the treaty) and how it has developed over 5 decades, are the three questions answered in this contribution. It is first shown that the design of a Single Market matters: it is not just about...