We develop a simple firm-based automaton model for global economic interdependence of countries using modern notions of self-organized criticality and recently developed dynamical renormalization-group methods. We demonstrate how extremely strong statistical correlations can naturally develop...

We describe the construction and analysis of asymmetric Cost Sharing mechanisms, in which a variety of axioms are applied to subsets of the agents/goods. We show that the analysis can be quite subtle as apparently similar axiomatizations lead to significantly different results; in particular,...

We provide a direct proof of a representation theorem for additive cost sharing methods as sums of path methods. Also, by directly considering the paths that generate some common additive cost sharing methods (Aumann-Shapley, Shapley Shubik, and Serial Cost) we show that they are consistent....

Which is the tighter constraint on private sector investment: weak property rights or limited access to external finance? From a survey of new firms in post-communist countries, we find that weak property rights discourage firms from reinvesting their profits, even when bank loans are available....

Existing studies establish a strong cross-country correlation between income and democracy but do not control for factors that simultaneously affect both variables. We show that controlling for such factors by including country fixed effects removes the statistical association between income per...