After decades of successful growth, economic unions have recently become the focus of heightened political controversy. We argue that this is partly due to the growth of trade between countries that are increasingly ...

One approach to urban areas emphasizes the existence of certain immutable relationships, such as Zipf's or Gibrat's Law. An alternative view is that urban change reflects individual responses to changing tastes or ...

This thesis is composed of three self-contained chapters. In the first chapter, I propose a theoretical model that shows that trusting strangers is one of the channels through which institutions determine positive economic ...

This thesis provides an investigation of the effects of trade, technology and natural resource shocks on local economies and local labor markets. In the first chapter, I explore theoretically the impact of recent improvements ...

Psychologists have long documented that we over-attribute people's actions to innate characteristics, rather than to luck or circumstances. Similarly, economists have found that both politicians and businessmen are rewarded ...

This paper develops a theoretical framework to study the interaction between globalization and political structure. We show that political structure adapts in a non-monotonic way to declining transport costs. Borders hamper ...

Protectionism enjoys surprising popular support, in spite of deadweight losses. At the same time, trade barriers appear to decline with public information about protection. This paper develops an electoral model with ...

Expensive infrastructure is ineffective if it doesn't travel the last mile. In nineteenth-century New York and modern Africa, disease has spread when urbanites chose not to use newly built sanitation infrastructure to save ...

Many real-world contracts contain vague clauses despite the enforcement risk they entail. To study the causes and consequences of this phenomenon, we build a principal agent model in which contracts can include vague clauses ...