In this paper we focus on a fundamental tension between the economies of agglomeration available to health care organizations and the impacts of spatial concentration of health care organizations on overall health outcomes. We identify plausible measures of health care concentration and...

This paper is an exploratory analysis of the role that banks play in supporting what Jevons called the mechanism of exchange. It considers a model economy in which exchange activities are facilitated and coordinated by a self-organizing network of entrepreneurial trading firms. Collectively,...

The extensive literature documenting differences in wages between immigrants and US-born workers suggests immigrant households may enter retirement at a significant financial disadvantage relative to households headed by the native-born. However, little work has examined differences in...

This paper uses tax return data from 1999 to 2009 to provide new estimates of wage losses during unemployment, and to examine how other types of income change dur- ing an unemployment spell. Periods of unemployment are associated with significant reductions in wage income, equivalent to...

This paper provides the first rigorous empirical analysis of markups on custodial foreign exchange trades. It finds that they substantially exceed relevant benchmarks such as interbank half-spreads. We trace this to an information asymmetry -- custodial bank dealers know more about their prices...

I describe a classroom tool that I believe is helpful in the teaching of microeconomics. It is potentially usefull in microeconomics and urban economics courses in a an economics departmen, but also in microeconomics cours in a variety of professional programs, such as in city and regional...

By providing incentives for sellers to act in a trustworthy manner, reputation mechanisms in many online environments can mitigate moral-hazard problems when particular buyers and sellers interact infrequently. However, these mechanisms rely on buyers sharing their private information about...