Entrepreneurs who start new firms may choose not-for-profit status as a means of commiting to soft incentives. Such incentives protect donors, volunteers, consumers and employees from ex post expropriation of profits by the entreperneur. We derive conditions under which completely...

Does the economic model of optimal punishment explain the variation in the sentencing of murderers? As the model predicts, we find that murderers with a high expected probability of recidivism receive longer sentences. Sentences are longest in murder types where apprehension rates are low, and...

Scholars in many fields of economics have become very interested in Silicon Valley-style agglomeration of individual industries. These agglomerations are striking features of the economic landscape and may provide insightsinto the nature of the increasing returns technologies and spillovers that...

Urban economics has traditionally viewed cities as having advantages in production and disadvantages in consumption. We argue that the role of urban density in facilitating consumption is extremely important and understudied. As firms become more mobile the success of cities hinges more and more...

The textbook graphical analysis of price control is inappropriate any time thre is substantial consumer heterogeneity. In cases, such as rental apartments, where one unit is usually the maximum bought per consumer, and the downward slope of the demand function comes exclusively from consumer...

Much of the world's countries have large primate cities. It is not uncommon to observe primate cities that have one-third or more of the urbanized (or sometime total) population of their countries. These primate cities are often associated with many of the worst features of urban concentration....

Crime rates are much higher in big cities than in either small cities or rural areas, and this situation has been relatively pervasive for several centuries. This paper attempts to explain this connection by using victimization data, evidence from the NLSY on criminal behavior and the Uniform...

Using a sample of Harvard undergraduates, the authors analyze the trust and social capital in two experiments. Trusting behavior and trustworthiness rise with social connectionl differences in race and nationality reduce the level of trusworthiness.

Will improvements in information technology eliminate face-toface interactions and make cities obsolete? In this paper, we present a model where individuals make contacts and choose whether to use electronic or face-to-face meetings in their interactions.