Using a market potential function, we examine the spatial correlation of wages and consumer purchasing power across regions in West Germany. The market potential function can be regarded as a reduced form of several new economic geography models. Thus, the estimation results provide some first...

This paper presents a regional economic model in which increasing returns to scale in the production of non-traded consumer services cause the agglomeration of high-skilled workers in one region. The residential choice of high-skilled individuals exerts a pecuniary externality on immobile...

The economic geography literature distinguishes between two types of reasons for economic agglomeration. Regional concentration of economic activity can be attributed to ''first nature'' meaning geographic advantages and disadvantages given by nature or to ''second nature'' meaning agglomeration...

A simple contract-theoretic model is used to show that, in a democratic system, positive political rents and efficient provision of public goods can characterize an equilibrium in the political contest. Moreover, this equilibrium is stable under the assumption that a fraction of the political...

An auction is viewed as a process that in equilibrium generates a binary lottery for each bidder,which the bidder "buys" with his bid. This view allows for a simple way to consistently assess differences in bidding behavior over different bidders and different auctions. E.g. all auctions covered...

This paper analyzes the bahavior of a principal with bounded memory who can offer a two-period performance-based contract to an agent. In the model he can choose whether to evaluate the agent after each period or only at the end of the second period. If the agent is wealth-constrained, the...

The paper tests for potential pricing-to-market for a wide range of export industries in selected transition economies, namely Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria, at the four-digit level over the period 1990-1998. Panel estimation is undertaken and a fixed-effects linear model is estimated. The...

In this paper a model of aggregate investment is derived, which incorporates fixed investment costs and capital market imperfections on the micro-level. Aggregate investment reacts nonlinearly with respect to aggregate shocks to productivity and liquidity of firms. Employing nonparamatric kernel...

Consider an economy in which households differ in behavior and disposable income: (i) we derive conditions on the joint distribution of both characteristics such that the Law of Demand holds for aggregate demand. We obtain that the poorer the household the less its behavior affects the structure...

The agglomeration of industries has received much interest both in empirical and theoretical work in recent time. Especially in Germany politicians became inspired by the notion of high-technology industry clusters and German regional policy has seen a wave of initiatives aiming at the formation...