This paper asks whether population growth is conducive to the sustainability of cooperation. A simple model is developed in which farmers who live around a circular lake engage in trade with their adjacent neighbors. The payoffs from this activity are governed by a prisoner's dilemma rule of...

A migration network is modeled as a mutually beneficial cooperative agreement between financially-constrained individuals who seek to finance and expedite their migration. The cooperation agreement creates a network: established migrants contract to support the subsequent migration of others in...

Consider a population of farmers who live around a lake. Each farmer engages in trade with his m adjacent neighbors, where m is termed the span of interaction. Trade is governed by a prisoner's dilemma rule of engagement. A farmer's payoff is the sum of the payoffs from the m prisoner's dilemma...

Let a society's unhappiness be measured by the aggregate of the levels of relative deprivation of its members. When two societies of equal size, F and M, merge, unhappiness in the merged society is shown to be higher than the sum of the levels of unhappiness in the constituent societies when...

This paper identifies the migration policies that emerge when both the sending country and the receiving country wield power to set migration quotas, when controlling migration is costly, and when the decision how much human capital to acquire depends, among other things, on the migration...

This paper develops a model of voluntary migration into degrading work. The essence of the model is a tension between two bads that which arises from being relatively deprived at home, and that which arises from engaging in humiliating work away from home. Balancing between these two bads can...

In this paper I study policy responses to an increase in post-merger distress. I consider the integration of regions and nations as a merger of populations which I view as a revision of social space, and I identify the effect of the merger on aggregate distress. The paper is based on the premise...

In this paper we study the impact of the international migration of unskilled workers on skill formation and the average skill level in the home country. We analyze what appears to be the least threatening scenario from the point of view of its effect on the supply of skills at home: namely,...

We investigate the impact of the imposition of sanctions for employing illegal migrants on the welfare of native workers. Our analysis is based on the premise that in response to such sanctions, managers in a firm may be reassigned from supervision of production to verification of the legality...