This important Handbook reveals that most urban growth takes place in the less developed world and much of it represents over-urbanization – that is, urbanization in which most migrants cannot effectively compete for employment, cannot find adequate shelter and do not have the means to...

In settings where the Revelation Principle applies, delegation arrangements are frequently inferior to centralized decision-making, and at best achieve the same level of performance.This paper studies the value of delegation when organizations are constrained by a bound on the number of...

This paper develops a model of budgeting in hierarchical organizations. Each agent (manager) in the hierarchy receives a budget for a task; based on his own information, the agent assigns tasks and budgets to his subordinates, who, in turn, do the same for their subordinates and so forth. Each...

This paper examines whether historical ealth distributions can affect long run output and distribution despite rational saving behavior and absence of any technological nonconvexities or externalities. We consider a model of equilibrium short period financial contracts, where poor agents face...

This paper studies the persistence of inequality and lack of intergenerational mobility in a human capital accumulation model with perfect certainty, missing credit markets, endogenous training costs and dynastic utility maximization by households. Persistent inequality and immobility in steady...

We consider a model in which customers sequentially negotiate nonexclusive credit or insurance contracts from multiple risk-neutral firms in a market with free entry. Each contract is subject to moral hazard arising from a common noncontractible effort decision.