Employment growth is strongly predicted by smaller average establishment size, both across cities and across industries within cities, but there is little consensus on why this relationship exists. Traditional economic explanations emphasize factors that reduce entry costs or raise...

It is difficult to justify tax incentives within the existing economics literature on tax competition. We develop a model in which communities are interested in attracting firms not only for their own capital but also for the “concentration externalities,” a form of agglomeration economies,...

This paper formalizes in a fully-rational model the popular idea that politicians perceive an electoral cost in adopting costly reforms with future benefits and reconciles it with the evidence that reformist governments are not punished by voters. To do so, it proposes a model of elections where...

We study the determinants of political myopia in a rational model of electoral accountability where the key elements are informational frictions and uncertainty. We build a framework where political ability is ex-ante unknown and policy choices are not perfectly observable. On the one hand,...

This paper analyses the effect of tobacco prices on the propensity to start and quit smoking using a pool of the 1993, 1995 and 1997 editions of the Spanish National Health Surveys. The estimates for several parametric models of the hazard rate for starting and quitting suggest that i) The...

The objective of this study consists in quantifying in money terms the potential reduction in usage of public health care outlets associated to the tenure of double (public plus private) insurance. In order to address the problem, a probabilistic model for visits to physicians is specified and...

As part of a process of democratization, many countries spanning Europe, Latin Amertica, Africa, and Asia are reorganizing their governments by devolving fiscal responsibility and authority to newly empowered regional and local governments. Although decentralization in each country proceeds...

The objective of this study consists in quantifying in money terms the potential reduction in usage of public health care outlets associated to the tenure of double (public plus private) insurance. In order to address the problem, a probabilistic model for visits to physicians is specified and...

This paper analyses the effect of tobacco prices on the propensity to start and quit smoking using a pool of the 1993, 1995 and 1997 editions of the Spanish National Health Surveys. The estimates for several parametric models of the hazard rate for starting and quitting suggest that i) The...

We build a model of mutual fund competition in which a fraction of investors ("unsophisticated") exhibit a preference for familiarity. Funds differ both in their quality and their visibility: While unsophisticated investors have varying degrees of familiarity with respect to more visible funds,...