Global games of regime change – coordination games of incomplete information in which a status quo is abandoned once a sufficiently large fraction of agents attacks it – have been used to study crises phenomena such as currency attacks, bank runs, debt crises, and political change. We extend...

The evolution of large-scale cooperation among genetic strangers is a fundamental unanswered question in the social sciences. Behavioral economics has persuasively shown that so called "strong reciprocity" plays a key role in accounting for the endogenous enforcement of cooperation. Insofar as...

Young highly educated workers developed in the 70's and 80's a preference for working in larger cities. As a consequence highly educated young workers in 1990 were over-represented in cities, in spite of the lower wage premium they earned for working in crowded metropolitan areas if compared to...

In an interesting and influential paper Robert Lucas (1993) considering the experience of East Asian small economies, suggests that on the job" learning could be the principal engine of their miraculous growth in the last 20 years. In this paper I develop an overlapping generation model where on...

In economics, the standard approach to language is that talk is cheap. Here, instead, language is a social convention that affects utility. Unless language is used in its ordinary sense, it cannot help to coordinate actions because there is no way of decoding it. This points to a unique...

Many facts are learned through the intermediation of individuals with special access to information, such as law enforcement officers, officials with a security clearance, or experts with specific knowledge. This paper considers whether societies can learn about such facts when information is...