We develop a parsimonious general equilibrium model where agents allocate time across three activities: production, trade, and leisure. Leisure includes time spent socializing, which economizes transaction costs. Our framework yields multiple equilibria in terms of the number of social ties and...

To secure their membership in a popular group, individuals may contribute more to the group’s local public good than they would if group formation were exogenous. Those in the most unpopular group do not have this incentive to contribute to their group. Substantial differences in individual...

The focus of this study is on black markets which provide an important segment of the parallel economy. These markets operate in disequilibrium,search and information costs become very important.Trafficking in drugs taken as case, to explore both theoretically and empirically. The problem,...

This paper models how imperfect memory affects the optimal continuity of policies. We examine the choices of a player (individual or firm) who observes previous actions but cannot remember the rationale for these actions. In a stable environment, the player optimally responds to memory loss with...

We model side payments in a competitive credit-card market. If competitive retailers charge a single (higher) price to cover the cost of accepting cards, banks must subsidize convenience users to prevent them from defecting to merchants who do not accept cards. The side payment will be financed...

We present identification and estimation results for the 'collective' model of labour supply in which there are discrete choices, censoring of hours and non-participation in employment. We derive the collective restrictions on labour supply functions and contrast them with restrictions implied...

This paper is about instability of equilibrium real rents in a pure exchange economy. Our main result hinges upon a low degree of substitutability between housing services and other commodities together with a low share of owner-occupied houses. We argue that regions or economies with a low...

This paper presents a simple model of housing cycles in a two good economy. We establish that nonsubstitutability between housing services and other commodities along with high degree of heterogeneity in home ownership may lead to a stable spiral path converging to a steady-state equilibrium of...

In the present paper, we develop a new approach to deal with female labor supply in the so-called collective framework. It is often empirically observed that the husband's labor supply is fixed at full-time or determined by demand-side constraints. From this observation, we elaborate a model...