We analyze the formation of a hierarchy of groups such as herds, members of a "rung" in a tennis ladder, students at a particular quality of college, or club members sharing a local public good. An individual is interested in maximizing her individual payoff which depends on a variable...

Many sources of urban agglomeration involve departures from the first-best world. By modeling the microstructure of agglomeration economies, we derive second-best benefit evaluation formulae for urban transportation improvements. Previous work has investigated the same problem, but without...

Modeling a micro-structure of agglomeration economies, this article derives a second-best benefit evaluation formula for urban transportation improvements. Without explicitly modeling the sources of agglomeration economies, Venables (JTEP 2007) investigated the same problem. This article...

In this monograph several aspects of externalities in cities are analyzed using extensions of a standard residential land use model. Topics covered are optimal and market city sizes, local public goods, traffic congestion, externalities between different types of households, and the growth of a...

The land prices in Japan are abnormally high by international standards. Their adverse effects are intensely reflected in the inferior housing conditions in large cities. Especially in the large metropolitan regions, people are forced to live in small houses, which have been compared to "rabbit...

The Henry George Theorem (HGT), or the golden rule of local public finance, states that, in first-best economies, the fiscal surplus, defined as aggregate land rents minus aggregate losses from increasing returns to scale activities, is zero at optimal city sizes. We derive a general second-best...

Many sources of urban agglomeration, such as the gains from variety, bette rmatching, and knowledge creation and diffusion, involve departures from the first-best world. Benefit evaluation of a transportation project must then take into account changes in excess burden along with any direct user...

This paper examines the agglomeration benefits of a transportation improvement in a city by modeling the microstructure of urban agglomeration based on monopolistic competition of differentiated intermediate products. Properly extended to include variety distortion in addition to price...