We take up a growth model with both skilled and unskilled labor, and a steady migration of some unskilled workers, who undertake apprenticing, to the skilled group of workers. Apprenticing involves a period of observing and thus labor output foregone. The time-out for observing represents a cost...

We report on the nature of a utility optimizing transfer from one regional government to another when local public goods are present. Computer examples reveal that small differences in regional endowments result in large differences in equilibrium outcomes for two regions, under optimal...

Humans exhibit much more sharing of food harvested by prime-age hunter-gatherers with dependents relative to such sharing by lower-order primates. We investigate this behavior in a model in which a father provides generously to his dependent child-son in period t in the hope that this gesture...

We link daily price-changes for 11 Dow-Jones companies for 5 three month periods to the prevailing interest rate. In "normal times", the interest carrying cost of owning a share exceeds average price change. In periods of high volatility (eg. August to November, 2008), average price change...

We translate Hotelling's continuous-time, exhaustible resource extraction Model of 1931 into a linear program of present value extraction cost minimization subject to a stock endowment and period by period demand constraints. The appropriate form of the demand constraints allows for resource...

We set out an open, monocentric city with residential structures and reflect how changes to the amenity index affects the city. On the consumption side an amenity is represented by an exogenous boost to the utility of a resident's current commodity bundle. The cities population, land rent and...

We back out an estimate of a personal discount rate of between 3 and 4 percent for a person with a life expectancy of 74 years who dies at age 30 (or 40) and has a value of statistical life of $6.3 million. Central to these calculations is the series generated by Murphy and Topel of value of...

Beckmann;s interaction model has each resident touching base in face-to-face activity with every other resident, per unit time, at the other's residence. We re-work his resulting "interaction city" with each resident "operating with" a Cobb-Douglas utility function. We then turn to a more...

We draw on Ricardian comparative advantage between distinct persons to map out the division of labor among proto-humans in a village some 1.7 million years ago. A person specialized in maintaining a cooking fire in the village is of particular interest (Ofek [2001]). We are also interested in...