Travel restrictions are often imposed to limit the spread of infectious diseases. As uniform restrictions can be inefficient and incur unnecessarily high costs, this paper examines the optimal design of restrictions that target specific travel routes. We propose a model with trade-offs between...

When agents have present bias, they discount more between now and the next period than between period t ( 1) and t + 1. How fast the future discount rate (evaluated today) decays is an empirical question. We show that the discount function can be non-parametrically identified with contracts that...

This paper provides a systematic analysis of the way shifts in property utilization rights in China induced another sequence of institutional changes that led to the rise of rural-urban labor migration from 1980 to 1984, a critical period in the country's market transition. I show that the...

Recent theoretical work has examined the spatial distribution of unemployment using theefficiency wage model as the mechanism by which unemployment arises in the urbaneconomy. This paper extends the standard efficiency wage model in order to allow forbehavioral substitution between leisure time...

The aim of this paper is to provide a new mechanism based on social interactions explaining why distance to jobs can have a negative impact on workers' labor-market outcomes, especially ethnic minorities. Building on Granovetter's idea that weak ties are superior to strong ties for providing...

We examine how interaction choices depend on the interplay of social and physical distance, and show that agents who are more central in the social network, or are located closer to the geographic center of interaction, choose higher levels of interactions in equilibrium. As a result, the level...

We develop a new methodology to estimate the elasticity of urban costs with respect to city population using French land price data. Our preferred estimate, which handles a number of estimation concerns, stands at 0.041. Our approach also yields a number of intermediate outputs of independent...

This paper analyses the interrelationship between the process of suburbanization and a changing political and ethnic landscape in the Vilnius urban region. The region surrounding Vilnius city is dominated by Polish identity residents while those who suburbanise into the region are mainly ethnic...

We develop a search-matching model with rural-urban migration and an explicit land market. Wages, job creation, urban housing prices are endogenous and we characterize the steady-state equilibrium. We then consider three different policies: a transportation policy that improves the public...

We propose a new nonparametric approach to estimate the production function for housing. Our estimation treats output as a latent variable and relies on the first-order condition for profit maximisation with respect to non-land inputs by competitive house builders. For parcels of a given size,...