The paper addresses the empirical significance of the social context in economic decisions. Decisions of individuals who share spatial and social milieus are likely to be interdependent, and econometric identification of social effects poses intricate data and methodological problems, including...

The paper studies intercity trade and growth in an overlapping-generations economy where tradeable goods are produced using a composite of capital, raw labor and intermediates, and are combined in each city to produce a composite. The composite is used for consumption and investment....

The paper solves themselves into neighborhoods because they value average schooling among adults in the neighborhood. The paper extends results by Nesheim (2002) but with the addition of income effects on neighborhood choice. Individuals value housing, non-housing consumption, and expected...

Research in sociology and economics point to important role for social networks in labor markets. Social contacts mediate propagation of rich and reliable information among indi- viduals and thus help workers find jobs and employers find employees. Recent theoretical advances show that for...

This review of current research on networks emphasizes three strands of the literature on social networks. The first strand is composed of models of endogenous network formation from both the economics and the computer science literature. The review highlights the sen- sitive dependence of the...

We review the accumulated knowledge on city size distributions and determinants of urban growth. This topic is of interest because of a number of key stylized facts, including notably Zipf’s law for cities (which states that the number of cities of size greater than S is proportional to 1/S)...

This paper provides the first empirical test of the role of history versus expectations in U.S. urban development. Starting from Paul Krugman's theoretical work in new economic geography, we test whether or not a modern city develops because of either advantageous initial conditions or by way of...

This paper revisits the literature on modelling organizations by means of networks of agents. Individual agents are engaged in screening projects, and architectural features of organizations, that is how each agent’s decision combines with those of others, a®ect the organization’s screening...