Full Solution of an Endogenous Sorting Model with Contextual and Income Effects

The paper solves themselves into neighborhoods because they value average schooling among adults in the neighborhood. The paper extends results by Nesheim (2002) but with the addition of income effects on neighborhood choice. Individuals value housing, non-housing consumption, and expected schooling of their children. The latter depends on parental schooling, on a child's ability, and on average schooling in the neighborhood. Neighborhood choice trades off non-housing consumption with children's expected schooling. Individuals choose neighborhoods recongnizing that their neighbors' characteristics are correlated with their own. The equilibrium housing price is associated with endogenous sorting and also allows computation of a neighborhood distributions of income, schooling and other variables of interest.

Complexity and Organizational Architecture

This paper revisits the literature on modelling organizations by means of networks of agents. Individual agents are engaged in screening projects, and architectural features of organizations, that is how each agent’s decision combines with those of others, a®ect the organization’s screening performance. It emphasizes how an organization of several agents may be improve upon individual performance by a suitable arrangement of the flow of decisions. The paper is motivated, in part, by a theorem due to Von Neumann, Moore and Shannon on how to build reliable networks using unreliable components and extends previous contributions by Sah and Stiglitz by recasting their original model in standard firm-theoretic terms and endogenizing its features. For an organization’s screening performance to improve over those of an individual’s, it must be sigmoid in individual performance, as measured by the probability that a good (bad) project be accepted (rejected). This is indeed the case for organizations with mixed Sah-stiglitz architectures, such as hierarchies made up of components that are polyarchies, and polyarchies made up of components that are hierarchies, give rise to such functions. This property is in turn critical for determining of the optimal number of levels of a hierarchy, and for endogenizing individual screening performance. The models are extended to allow for individuals’ own screening to be influenced from the opinions of superiors and subordinates. The paper examines the implications of such interactions for the limits to organizational performance.government to influence the real value of assets using fiscal and monetary policy.organizations, architecture, complexity, composition

Intercity Trade and Convergent versus Divergent Urban Growth

The paper studies intercity trade and growth in an overlapping-generations economy where tradeable goods are produced using a composite of capital, raw labor and intermediates, and are combined in each city to produce a composite. The composite is used for consumption and investment. Tax-financed investment that affects commuting costs endogenizes city size. A combination of weak (strong) diminishing returns and strong (weak) market size effects can lead to increasing (decreasing) returns to scale. Autarkic urban growth may be parallel or divergent. Capital growth in the integrated economy has the same dynamic properties as its counterpart for an economy with autarkic cities but leads to national constant returns to scale.

Neighborhood Effects: Accomplishments and Looking Beyond Them

The paper addresses the empirical significance of the social context in economic decisions. Decisions of individuals who share spatial and social milieus are likely to be interdependent, and econometric identification of social effects poses intricate data and methodological problems, including dealing with self-selection in spatial and socail groups. It uses a simple empirical framework to introduce social interactions effects at different levels of aggregation, and examines estimation problems into linear models, the impact of self-selection and of non linearities. It also examines neighborhood effects in job matching and proposes a research agenda that offers new techniques and data sources.Neighborhood effects, social interactions, social networks, social effects, self-selection, neighborhood choice, social multiplier, spatial effects

The Evolution of City Size Distributions

We review the accumulated knowledge on city size distributions and determinants of urban growth. This topic is of interest because of a number of key stylized facts, including notably Zipf’s law for cities (which states that the number of cities of size greater than S is proportional to 1/S) and the importance of urban primacy. We first review the empirical evidence on the upper tail of city size distribution. We offer a novel discussion of the important econometric issues in the characterization of the distribution. We then discuss the theories that have been advanced to explain the approximate constancy of the distribution across very different economic and social systems, emphasizing both bare-bone statistical theories and more developed economic theories. We discuss the more recent work on the determinants of urban growth and, in particular, growth regressions, economic explanations of city size distributions other than Gibrat’s law, consequences of major shocks (quasi natural experiments), and the dynamics of U.S. urban evolution.city size distribution, Gibrat’s law, Hill estimator, persistence of city size distributions, power laws, random growth, urban growth, urban hierarchy, urban primacy, Zipf regression, Zipf’s law.

Searching for the Best Neighborhood: Mobility and Social Interactions

The paper seeks to contribute to the social interactions literature by exploiting data on individuals’ self-selection into neighborhoods. We study a model in which households search for the best location in the presence of neighborhood effects in the formation of children’s human capital and in the process of cultural transmission. We use micro data from the PSID which we have merged, using geocodes, with contextual information at the levels of census tracts and of counties from the 2000 US Census. We control for numerous individual characteristics and neighborhood attributes and find, consistently with neighbourhood effects models, that households with children, but not those without, are more likely to move out of neighborhoods whose attributes are not favorable to the production of human capital and the transmission of parents’ cultural traits, and to move into neighborhoods which instead exhibit desirable such attributes.

Migration and economic growth: Towards an understanding of the postwar European experience

[Δε διατίθεται περίληψη / no abstract available][Δε διατίθεται περίληψη / no abstract available