Controlling for country fixed effects, there is a positive and statistically significant relationship between the degree of housing market regulation (HMR) and the strictness of employment protection legislation (EPL) in OECD countries. We provide a model in which HMR increases foreclosure costs...

This paper provides a method to single out customer-based discrimination in the housing market. We build a matching model with ethnic externalities where landlords differ in the number of housing units they own within the same building. Multiple-dwelling landlords discriminate more often than...

This paper documents a strong positive relationship between individual reported trust levels (obtained from the US General Social Survey) and the competitiveness of the sector in which an individual works (obtained from the US census of firms). This correlation is robust to the inclusion of all...

Recent evidence shows that the 'home bias puzzle' in international trade may be associated with the mere presence of national borders (McCallum (1995)). In this paper we provide a theoretical framework to explain why borders may matter so much for trade. Our argument is that even between...

We revisit the question of the efficiency of individual decisions to be protected against crime for the cases of both observable and unobservable protection. We obtain that observable protection is unambiguously associated with a negative externality and that at the individual level, it has a...

Regions can benefit by offering infrastructure services that are differentiated by quality, thus segmenting the market for industrial location. Regions that compete on infrastructure quality have an incentive to increase the degree of differentiation between them. This places an upper bound on...

We propose a market-for-offenses model of property crime, which explicitly accounts for protection expenditures among heterogeneous individuals. The crime equilibrium is modeled as a free-access equilibrium in which the match between criminals and victims equates the average returns to crime. We...

Recent evidence shows that the ‘home bias puzzle’ in international trade may be associated with the mere presence of national borders (McCallum (1995)). In this Paper we provide a theoretical framework to explain why borders may matter so much for trade. Our argument is that even between...

In this Paper, we develop a two country four region model allowing for a core periphery pattern inside countries. We then examine how both the integration and the agglomeration process inside a given country affects the pattern of specialization and international trade. We also analyse how...

In the present paper, we analyze an original channel of interaction between politicians and lobbies i.e. the nuisance power of a lobby. Some lobbies are influencing public policies just because they are able to impact negatively the image of a politician. More particularly, we develop a setting...