We develop a model with a finite number of households and congestable local public goods where the level of provision, the number of facilities and their locations are all endogenously determined. We prove that an equal-treatment identical-provision second-best optimum exists, where all...

Conventional wisdom tells us that with no market failure and local non- satiation of preferences, the core is at least as large as the collection of competitive equilibrium allocations. We confirm this for a standard model featuring land. Next we consider the public land ownership version of the...

We present a simple model of spatial evolution that avoids several problems that arise with more complex networks of players. We consider a world where pairs of players are matched forever. These players learn from the whole population but they are more likely to learn to strategies used by...

The goal of this essay is to introduce advanced undergraduates to urban general equilibrium theory.

We present two notions of “no arbitrage” in urban economic models and show that there is no model satisfying both. The standard hedonic housing model of urban economics and its generalizations are consistent with the first of these, but inconsistent with the second. We present a model...

Concern is growing regarding the poverty impacts of trade liberalization. The strong general equilibrium effects of trade liberalization can only be properly analysed in a CGE model. However, the aggregate nature of CGE models is not suited to detailed poverty analysis. We bridge this gap by...

Regional integration for at least the last sixty years has focused on trade integration. Balassa’s canonical taxonomy of regional trading arrangements is often interpreted as a sequence from free trade area through customs union and common market to economic union. In the 1980s the concept of...

Whether bilateral trade barrier data conform with the Grossman-Helpman (1995) model’s predictions about “trade talks” is examined in this article. A simple form of the prediction from the model is tested. Bilateral US-Japan and US-EU data from the 1990s are employed. The results are the...

In this paper, we present a technique to decompose changes in factor prices into the contribution of major determinants, namely movements in domestic and international prices, changes in capital and labour quantities, and technological progress. This is done in an open-economy framework. While...

Removal of tariff restrictions from the relatively low-skill sectors; growth in foreign direct investment; and, decline of trade union strength of the unskilled workers are cited in the empirical literature as the prime factors responsible for the growing incidence of wage inequality in many of...