Given President Bush's popularity among relatively poor rural residents and lack thereof among wealthier urban dwellers in the 2004 presidential election, analysts have suggested that voters contradicted their economic self-interests. We investigate whether this conventional wisdom implied an...

Given President Bush's popularity among relatively poor rural residents and lack thereof among wealthier urban dwellers in the 2004 presidential election, analysts have suggested that voters contradicted their economic self-interests. We investigate whether this conventional wisdom implied an...

We measure the effect of governance on sovereign creditworthiness, as measured by sovereign credit ratings. Governance may affect the government's ability to raise tax revenue to service its debt, with poor enough governance leading to insolvency. Data for 1996-2005 indicate that countries with...

I demonstrate that in the monocentric city model, an allocation is in the core if and only if it is an equilibrium allocation, as long as households are endowed with strictly positive quantities of a composite consumption good, enjoy any net trade bundle at least as much as they enjoy one on the...

Firms' location decisions often drive economic models of agglomeration, so distinguishing the causes of agglomeration requires understanding those decisions. Firms value proximity to (1) customers in market access models, (2) other firms as sources of positive externalities in production...

I show that equilibria exist in closed city-system models with production externalities if firms' production possibilities vary continuously with the source of the externality, are constant returns to scale in own inputs, include inaction, and satisfy free disposal; if firms have to employ their...

We estimate the impact of corruption on a country's creditworthiness. Corruption affects creditworthiness through its impact on the size of the formal sector of an economy. We find that creditworthiness, as measured by sovereign credit ratings, is decreasing in corruption. It follows from our...