La nouvelle économie géographique présente les « rendements croissants d’agglomération » comme une variable explicative privilégiée de la concentration spatiale de l’activité économique. Dans ce cadre théorique, ces rendements croissants découleraient d’une préférence pour la...

La concentration de l’activité économique dans l’espace, et l’existence même des villes, est une des régularités empiriques les plus visibles en économie. Il n’est donc pas étonnant que cet aspect géographique de l’économie soit une notion ancienne, comme le montrent les...

Maximum entropy predictions are made for the Kirman ant model as well as the Abrams-Strogatz model of language competition, also known as the voter model. In both cases the maximum entropy methodology provides good predictions of the limiting distribution of states, as was already the case for...

Face au ralentissement des ventes de véhicules, le « Pacte automobile » mobilise 9 milliards d’euros pour venir en aide aux constructeurs français. L’enjeu est triple : soutenir à court terme la demande et l’emploi, assurer l’avenir d’une industrie stratégique au regard des...

This paper analyses the methodology developed by Behrens and Murata (2007) to introduce variable mark-ups into models of monopolistic competition. Their risk- aversion explanation to the presence of ¯xed mark-ups in the Dixit and Stiglitz (1977) model is validated; however, we show that their...

An inconsistency is found in the demand side of the NEG models developed in Pflüger (2004) that follows from the absence of a non-negativity constraint on the consumption of agricultural goods. This seriously weakens the results of the original paper and those of ensuing contributions in...

Using a generalised version of the Venables (1996) model, this paper explores the relative locations of two vertically linked sectors with knowledge spillovers. Analytical investigation shows that the dynamic properties of the Venables model are significantly affected by the presence of...

Following Becker (1962), an information-theoretical thought experiment is developed to investigate whether the equilibrium properties of an exchange economy depend on the rational behaviour of agents. Transactions are logged through a communication channel into an external observer's dataset,...

Two stage least squares are a popular method of estimation of spatial auto-regressive models, where the dependent variable in an area is a function of the value of the same variable in contiguous areas. Existing literature on this topic points out, however, that this creates problems of...

An information-theoretic thought experiment is developed to provide a methodology for predicting endowment distributions in the absence of information on agent preferences. The allocation problem is first presented as a stylised knapsack problem. Although this knapsack allocation is intractable,...