Explaining intercity home price differences

This paper develops and tests an equilibrium model seeking to explain intercity variation in owner-occupied housing prices. Empirical tests with a reduced form equation using aggregated 1980 data on 94 SMSAs suggest explanation for 84% of this intercity home price variation. Intercity housing demand, based upon homeowner quality of life equilibrium, is successfully represented by the non-monetary income determinant of climate mildness in addition to several monetary income determinants that reflect household residual after-tax real income. Intercity housing supply was found to be influenced by intercity variation in construction costs and limitations upon the available supply of undeveloped urban land.     

On the relationship between migration and fertility

The relationship between migration and fertility is examined. The author proposes an alternative model to those used previously and applies it to data from the 1973 National Demographic Survey of the Philippines. The model assumes that although the fertility of migrants declines initially because of economic and psychological hardships, it rises subsequently as migrants become settled in their new environment.     

Sociological versus strategic factors in bargaining

Most game-theoretic models of strategic interaction, indeed most economic models of any sort, specify potential outcomes entirely in terms of the preferences of the agents, as captured in their (possibly cardinal) utility functions. The underlying assumption is that the outcome of such interactions is determined entirely by these preferences, together with the strategic possibilities available to the agents. The purpose of this paper is to challenge the adequacy of this assumption in general, by investigating it in the specific context of two-person bargaining. In particular, we consider whether certain experimental results reported earlier can be accounted for strictly in terms of players' preferences and strategic possibilities, and we report a new experimental study designed to answer this question. The results strongly support the conclusion that sociological factors, unrelated to what we normally consider to be the ‘economic’ parameters of a game, can decisively influence the outcome of bargaining, in a systematic manner.