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...

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...

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...

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...

We analyze group contests for public goods by applying the solution concept of an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS). We show that a global ESS cannot exist, because a mutant free-rider can always invade group behavior succesfully. There does exist, however, a unique local ESS, which we identify...

This paper tests the hypothesis that product market competition has a negative impact on spatial agglomeration. This hypothesis emerges as an interpetation of the models by Combes and Duranton (2001) and Alsleben (2005) which are about firms' location choice in the presence of knowledge...

This paper examines exercise policies for capacity reduction options in a duopolistic market that is subject to aggregate shocks. Firms face an inverse demand that exhibits second-mover advantages rather than the complementary property of first-mover advantages commonly assumed in the literature...

We study rent-seeking contests, where the set of players contains both players with independent preferences and players with interdependent preferences. It turns out that the latter experience a strategic advantage in general two-player contests and in n-player-contests with non-increasing...