Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky...

New York City is often held up as a successful example of arts-led economic development. Case studies have documented the influx of avant-garde artists and galleries into several neighborhoods, including Greenwich Village, Soho, and Chelsea, followed by yuppies and boutiques. Some researchers...

Contemporary, postmodern cities are cities of consumption, rather than of production. While for industrial cities typical spatial model was a factory, for consumption cities it is a shopping centre – a place where people can meet all their needs, not only by shopping and entertaining, but also...

A substantial number of studies have extended the work on universal properties in physical systems to complex networks in social, biological, and technological systems. In this paper, we present a complex networks perspective on interfirm organizational networks by mapping, analyzing and...

Potential home buyers may initiate contact with a real estate agent by asking to see a particular advertised house. This paper asks whether an agent's response to such a request depends on the race of the potential buyer or on whether the house is located in an integrated neighborhood. We build...

Financially constrained borrowers have the incentive to influence the appraisal process in order to increase borrowing or reduce the interest rate. We document that the average valuation bias for residential refinance transactions is above 5%. The bias is larger for highly leveraged...

This paper examines the impact of the spatial accessibility of public human services agencies on the likelihood of receiving a child care subsidy among disadvantaged mothers with young children. In particular, we collect data on the location of virtually every human services agency in the US and...

We survey concert-goers during the season and gather revealed preference and ex-ante stated preference data. We then survey the same concert goers after the season and gather additional ex-post revealed preference data. Comparing ex-ante stated preference data to the ex-post revealed preference...

In this paper we summarise some of our recent work on consumer behaviour, drawing on recent developments in behavioural economics, in which consumers are embedded in a social context, so their behaviour is shaped by their interactions with other consumers. For the purpose of this paper we also...

Algan and Cahuc (2010) argue that “inherited trust†is a key factor in explaining growth rates across countries. They derive a measure of inherited trust by linking respondents' “home countries†in the United States General Social Survey (1972-2004) and the 2000 wave of the...