The textbook graphical analysis of price control is inappropriate any time thre is substantial consumer heterogeneity. In cases, such as rental apartments, where one unit is usually the maximum bought per consumer, and the downward slope of the demand function comes exclusively from consumer...

Much of the world's countries have large primate cities. It is not uncommon to observe primate cities that have one-third or more of the urbanized (or sometime total) population of their countries. These primate cities are often associated with many of the worst features of urban concentration....

If A is a set of social alternatives, a social choice rule (SCR) assigns a subset of A to each potential profile of individuals' preferences over A, where the subset is interpreted as the set of "welfare optima". A game form (or "mechanism") implements the social choice rule if, for any...

The authors exhibit an efficient auction (i.e., an auction that maximizes expected surplus conditional on all private and public information). In the case of private value, it is well-known that the Vickrey auction (for one good) or its Groves-Clark extension (for multiple goods) is efficient in...

We study the transmission of monetary policy from the United States to Canada under flexible exchange rates. Our results suggest that flexible exchange rates insulate a country from foreign monetary disturbances. We find that the direct effect of a monetary contraction in the U.S. is a small...

If household portfolios are constrained by borrowing and short-sales restrictions, or by fixed costs of participating in risky asset markets, then alternative retirement savings systems may affect household welfare by relaxing these constraints. This paper uses a calibrated partial-equilibrium...

In this paper we closely exemine the financial events following the Mexican peso devaluation to uncover new lesons about the nature of financial crises.

Crime rates are much higher in big cities than in either small cities or rural areas, and this situation has been relatively pervasive for several centuries. This paper attempts to explain this connection by using victimization data, evidence from the NLSY on criminal behavior and the Uniform...

We present data on ownership structures of large corporations in 27 wealthy economies, making an effort to identify ultimate controlling shareholders of these firms. We find that, except in economies with very good shareholder protection, relatively few of these firms are widely-held, in...