The empirical regularity known as Zipf’s law or the rank-size rule has motivated development of a theoretical literature to explain it. We examine the assumptions on consumer behavior, particularly about their inability to insure against the city-level productivity shocks, implicitly used in...

Zipf's law is one of the best known empirical regularities in urban economics. There is extensive research on the subject, where each city is treated symmetrically in terms of the cost of transactions with other cities. Recent developments in network theory facilitate the examination of an...

We wish to study optimal dynamic nonlinear income taxes. Do real-world taxes share some of their features? What policy prescriptions can be made? We study a two-period model, where the consumers and government each have separate budget constraints in the two periods, so income cannot be...