Skyscrapers in Manhattan need to be anchored to bedrock to prevent (possibly uneven) settling. This can potentially increase construction costs if the bedrock lies deep below the surface. The conventional wisdom holds that Manhattan developed two business centers--downtown and midtown--because...

We introduce social interactions into the Schelling model of residential choice. These social interactions take the form of a Prisoner's Dilemma game played with neighbors. First, we study the Schelling model over a wide range of utility functions and then proceed to study a spatial Prisoner's...

Agent-based economics, and more generally agent-based social sciences, have been around in various forms for over 30 years. The advent of higher speed computing and new tools for the computational learning fields led to a major increase in activity in the early 1990s through today. Research...

There is a large literature in economics and elsewhere on the emergence and evolution of cooperation in the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma. Recently this literature has expanded to include cooperation in spatial prisoner dilemma games where agents play only with local neighbors in a specified...

Skyscrapers in Manhattan must be anchored to bedrock to prevent (possibly uneven) settling; this can potentially increase construction costs if the bedrock lies deep below the surface. The conventional wisdom holds that Manhattan developed two business centers—downtown and...

Using vacant land sales, we construct a land value index for Manhattan from 1950 to 2013. We find three major cycles (1950 to 1977, 1977 to 1993, and 1993 to 2007), with land values reaching their nadir in 1977, two years after the city’s fiscal crises. Overall, we find the average annual real...

This paper compares and contrasts the determinants of the market for skyscrapers in Chicago and New York from 1885 to 2007, using annual time series data. I estimate the factors that determine both the number of skyscraper completions and the height of the tallest building completed each year in...

This paper is the first to rigorously test how height and output co-move. Because builders can use their buildings for non-rational or non-pecuniary gains, it is widely believed that (a) the most severe forms of height competition occur near the business cycle peaks and (b) that extreme height...

This paper investigates charter school performance in New Jersey from 2000 to 2006. The analysis shows that charter schools have lower performance than public schools in the same districts on fourth grade standardized tests for Language and Math, but performance improves as charter schools gain...

The European Union (EU) is facing the challenge of enlargement to almost double its current size. This change has strong implications for the balance of power among member states. Building on the work of Shapley (1977) and Owen (1972), we present a measure of power that is based on players'...