This paper presents an overlapping generations model to explain why humans live in families rather than in other pair groupings. Since most non-human species are not familial, something special must be behind the family. It is shown that the two necessary features that explain the origin of the...

We introduce relative concerns in the form of conspicuous consumption in a standard economic geography model a la Krugman. The keeping up with the Joneses effect brings a negative externality to some agents and gives them incentives to escape. The primary intuition is then that conspicuous...