This paper studies whether agents must agglomerate at a single location in a class of models of two-sided interaction. In these models there is an increasing returns effect that favors agglomeration, but also a crowding or market-impact effect that makes agents prefer to be in a market with...

This paper studies whether agents must agglomerate at a single location in a class of models of two-sided interaction. In these models there is an increasing returns effect that favors agglomeration, but also a crowding or market-impact effect that makes agents prefer to be in a market with...

We examine the labor market for mutual fund managers. Using data from 1992-1994, we find that quot;terminationquot; is more performance-sensitive for younger managers. We identify possible implicit incentives created by the termination-performance relationship. The shape of the...

This paper examines the agency conflict between mutual fund investors and mutual fund companies. Investors would like the fund company to use its judgment to maximize risk- adjusted fund returns. A fund company, however, in its desire to maximize its value as a concern has an incentive to take...

This paper studies the effect of randomness in per-period matching on the long-run outcome of non-equilibrium adaptive processes. If there are many matchings between each strategy revision, the randomness due to matching will be small; our question is when a very small noise due to matching has...

This paper studies the way that word-of-mouth communication aggregates the information of individual agents. We find that the structure of the communication process determines whether all agents end up making identical choices, with less communication making this conformity more likely. Despite...

This paper explores differences in the frequency with which students from different schools reach high levels of math achievement. Data from the American Mathematics Competitions is used to produce counts of high-scoring students from more than two thousand public, coeducational, non-magnet,...

We examine whether mutual fund performance is related to characteristics of fund managers that may indicate ability, knowledge, or effort. In particular, we study the relationship between performance and the manager's age, the average composite SAT score at the manager's undergraduate...

The paper examines the behaviour of "evolutionary" models with epsilon-noise like those which have been used recently to discuss the evolution of social conventions. The paper is built around two main observations: that the "long run stochastic stability" of a convention is related to the speed...