This paper examines the role of patent policy in a spatial model of sequential innovation. Initial entrepreneurs develop a new product market and anticipate that subsequent innovation may lead to a product line that consumers value more highly. The likelihood of sequential innovation increases...

For thousands of years, the Chinese and many other nations around the workd built defensive walls around their cities. This phenomenon is not well understood from an economic perspective. To rationalize the existence of city walls, we propose a simple model that relates the deimesions of city...

How does isolation affect the economic activity of cities? Transport costs are widely considered an important barrier to local economic activity but their impact in developing countries is not well-studied. This paper investigates the role of inter-city transport costs in determining the income...

This paper presents the results from a field experiment which varies the amount of information seen by two million job seekers when viewing 100,000 job postings on a large online job posting website. The information seen is the true number of people who previously started an application. This...

We examine changes in the use of nontax revenues for education finance from 1991-2010. Beyond the summary of usage over time, we ask whether non- traditional revenues like fees accentuate or mitigate the impact of downturns. More generally, we examine the extent to which school districts have...

The paper addresses the issue of corruption, which appears to be endemic in Greece. It reviews the facts about corruption as multi-faceted phenomenon and its close relationship to tax evasion, by comparing Greece to its EU partners, as well internationally. It addresses corruption as an instance...

We examine the effect of rainfall shocks on dowry deaths using data from 583 Indian districts for 2002-2007. We find that a one standard deviation decline in annual rainfall from the local mean increases reported dowry deaths by 7.8 percent. Wet shocks have no apparent effect. We examine...

Barro and McCleary (2003) is a key research contribution in the new literature exploring the macroeconomic effects of religious beliefs. This paper represents an effort to evaluate the strength of their claims. We evaluate their results in terms of replicability and robustness. While we find...

This paper provides a rich assessment of the demand characteristics for movie theatre attendance in two major metropolitan markets and provides strong support for the importance of spatial characteristics in empirical demand analysis. We provide evidence of the usual competitive effect of...