Does academic economic research produce material of scientific value, or are academic economists writing only for clients and peers? Is economics scholarship uniquely insular? We address these questions by quantifying interactions between economics and other disciplines. Changes in the impact of...

Dixit (1988) observed that the mathematical construct of "regulated Brownian motion" developed by Harrison (1985) had proved useful in economic models of decision-making under uncertainty. In a recent note he provided a number of methods for calculating expected discounted payoff functions based...

Collective action to remedy the losses of open access to common-pool resources often is late and incomplete, extending rent dissipation. Examples include persistent over-exploitation of oil fields and ocean fisheries, despite general agreement that production constraints are needed. Transaction...

Douglass North asked why some societies historically and contemporarily have rising per-capita incomes and individual welfare, whereas others do not? He argued that successful economies had property rights that encouraged markets, trade, and investment in new production and organizational...

In developing economies, mobile-linked services have the potential to significantly reduce transaction costs and provide a truly new conduit that could be used to facilitate the flow of savings into banks. We test this premise by introducing a product that permits Sri Lankan households to...

We study the effect of trading costs on information aggregation and acquisition in financial markets. For a given precision of investors' private information, an irrelevance result emerges when investors are ex-ante identical: price informativeness is independent of the level of trading costs....

We study how changes in trade barriers contributed to the dynamics of the US trade balance and real exchange rate since 1980 - a period when trade tripled. Using two dynamic trade models, we decompose fluctuations in the trade balance into terms related to trade integration (global and...

A general equilibrium model of an economy is presented where people hold money rather than bonds in order to economize on transaction costs. In any such model it is not optimal for individuals to instantaneously adjust their money holdings when new information arrives. The (endogenous) delayed...

Between 1905 and 1934 over 869 farmers in Owens Valley, California sold their land and associated water rights to Los Angeles, 250 miles to the southwest. This agriculture-to-urban water transfer increased Los Angeles' water supply by over 4 times, making the subsequent dramatic growth of the...

The expansion of markets and industrialization greatly increased the benefits of specialization in the U.S. economy. However, since the benefits of specialization can only be realized through trade, specialization significantly increases the volume of market transactions in the economy. The...