Urban growth and uninsured rural risk: Booming towns in bust times

Rapid urbanization also happens when economic growth and urban job creation are absent, such as in Africa and Latin America during the eighties. Why do some countries urbanize faster while having worse economic growth? This paper finds that higher aggregate agricultural risk induces rural-urban migration, providing an additional channel to explain the urbanization trend. Uninsurable expected risk will lead to rural-urban migration as a form of ex-ante insurance if households are liquidity constrained and cannot overcome adverse shocks. The effect is robust to controlling for the traditional view of urbanization driven by industrialization, and to several alternative explanations such as government spending.     

REGIONAL GDP IN BRITAIN, 1871–1911: SOME ESTIMATES

The paper builds on a method proposed by Geary and Stark for estimating regional incomes in Victorian Britain. This is modified by using tax data to allocate non‐wage income across regions. The results suggest that the coefficient of variation of regional GDP per head was rising rapidly prior to World War I in similar fashion to the late 20th century such that its level in 1901 and 2001 was about the same. In both episodes of globalization there were big winners and big losers among British regions.     

Endogenous groups and dynamic selection in mechanism design

We create a dynamic theory of endogenous risk sharing groups, with good internal information, and their coexistence with relative performance, individualistic regimes, which are informationally more opaque. Inequality and organizational form are determined simultaneously. Numerical techniques and succinct reformulations of mechanism design problems with suitable choice of promised utilities allow the computation of a stochastic steady state and its transitions. Regions of low inequality and moderate to high wealth (utility promises) produce the relative performance regime, while regions of high inequality and low wealth produce the risk sharing group regime. If there is a cost to prevent coalitions, risk sharing groups emerge at high wealth levels also. Transitions from the relative performance regime to the group regime tend to occur when rewards to observed outputs exacerbate inequality, while transitions from the group regime to the relative performance regime tend to come with a decrease in utility promises. Some regions of inequality and wealth deliver long term persistence of organization form and inequality, while other regions deliver high levels of volatility.     

Rising trade costs? Agglomeration and trade with endogenous transaction costs

Abstract.  While transport costs have fallen, the empirical evidence also points at rising total trade costs. In a model of industry location with endogenous transaction costs that seeks to replicate features from the machinery industry, we show how and under which conditions a decline in transport costs can lead to an increase in the total cost of trade. The subtle relationship between (endogenous) transport costs and the sensitivity of trade to distance is also explored.     

A note on representativeness and household finance

Previous research has shown that social households have a higher probability of owning risky assets. Using a representative sample of the German population, we demonstrate that the sociability effect is much stronger among people younger than 50.     

Collective management of residential housing in Russia: The importance of being social

Homeowners associations (HOAs) implement collective management in residential housing. We assess the performance of such associations in Russia by using the stochastic frontier technique. Cultural traits enabling tenants to make proper use of the HOA decision-making procedures are essential for resolving the collective action problem and ensure accountability of governing bodies and outside contractors. Such “technical civic competence” has a stronger impact on HOA performance than more conventional forms of social capital which rise in their significance when HOA governance breaks down and informal grassroots alternatives are mobilized instead. Massive and indiscriminate “supply-led” introduction of collective management in residential housing without matching cultural and institutional prerequisites could be counterproductive. Flexibility, freedom of choice, and market development are required to avert the failures of HOAs commonly observed in Russia.     

On the evolution of institutional comparative advantages

This article investigates how comparative advantages have changed in the last 30 years. Using export data for 100 countries over the period 1976-2004, it provides evidence that comparative advantages are not static, but change over time. Focussing on three different sources of institutional comparative advantage, it shows that they display different trends over time. Additionally, it shows that these effects are generally stronger for OECD countries.     

Do the world’s largest cities follow Zipf’s and Gibrat’s laws?

We examine whether the size distribution and the growth process of the world’s largest cities follow Zipf’s law and Gibrat’s law. The parametric results of the size distribution analysis reject Zipf’s law for all sample sizes and also show the Zipf exponent systematically declines as the sample size increases. The growth process analysis confirms Gibrat’s law and yields a local Zipf exponent of one for cities with a normalized population less than 0.53%, which includes about 95% of the total observations. The deviations from Zipf’s law occur at the extreme upper tail and are likely a result of restricted mobility of population across countries. However, given that Gibrat’s law holds, we can expect the size distribution to converge to Zipf’s law with a decline in the barriers to immigration.     

Overcoming the coordination problem: Dynamic formation of networks

We analyze a multi-period entry game among privately informed agents who differ with respect to the number of agents who must enter in order for their own entry to be profitable. In each period agents who have not yet joined decide whether to subscribe to a network. There exists a unique equilibrium that approximates any symmetric equilibrium arbitrarily closely as the discount factor approaches one. This resolves the coordination problem. Ex-post efficiency is necessarily achieved asymptotically as the population size grows large. These results do not hold if subscribers can reverse their decisions without cost.     

Strategic information transmission networks

We study a model of multi-player communication. Privately informed decision makers have different preferences about the actions they take, and communicate to influence each others? actions in their favor. We prove that the equilibrium capability of any player to send a truthful message to a set of players depends not only on the preference composition of those players, but also on the number of players truthfully communicating with each one of them. We establish that the equilibrium welfare depends not only on the number of truthful messages sent in equilibrium, but also on how evenly truthful messages are distributed across decision makers.     

Educational Attainment and Regional Economic Performance in Mexico

A growing number of studies confirm the importance of educational attainment and human capital investment as a means for improving per capita income performance. In developing countries, attention to this linkage has primarily been carried out using national data aggregates. For relatively large countries such as Mexico, it is helpful to conduct similar analyses that document regional market income patterns. This paper utilizes 2000 census data for all 31 states and the Federal District in Mexico City to quantify regional income performance. Similar to other studies conducted using regional data in higher income economies, results confirm strong links between education and incomes across Mexico.