There is a proliferation of economics blogs, with increasing numbers of economists attracting large numbers of readers, yet little is known about the impact of this new medium. Using a variety of experimental and non-experimental techniques, we try to quantify some of their effects. First, links...

The willingness to migrate and locational choice may be influenced by others’ choices or plans, particularly if the ‘other people’, such as family and friends, are migrants, former migrants, or potential migrants themselves. We examine the roles ‘other people’ play in influencing an...

An adversarial game is used to model the amount of influence a firm has over a government regulator, and its equilibrium level of regulation, as a function of firm fundamentals. The effective influence of a firm is identified as comprising both intrinsic and exerted components; where the latter...

Can we identify the members of a community who are best- placed to diffuse information simply by asking a random sample of in- dividuals? We show that boundedly-rational individuals can, simply by tracking sources of gossip, identify those who are most central in a network according to...

This paper studies multi-agent optimal contracting with cost synergies. We model synergies as the extent to which effort by one agent reduces his colleague's marginal cost of effort. An agent's pay and effort depend on the synergies he exerts, the synergies his colleagues exert on him and,...

This paper documents a stylized fact: the Third World has been undergoing an emigration life cycle since the 1960s, and, except for Africa, emigration rates have been level or even declining since a peak in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The current economic crisis will serve only to...

We use all available waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances to document the evolution of the wealth distribution in the US since the 1980s. We then rely on the shape of this distribution to estimate a life-cycle incomplete markets model. We find that considering a wide range of net-worth...

While acknowledging the importance of fairness and the need to avoid creating disincentives in the design of tax reform, the Henry Review recommends a simplified Personal Income Tax and child payments withdrawn on a single family income test. This paper shows that the proposed reforms would...