I will try to make sense of this trend in this paper by formally showing how material growth increases the time spent working in the market while it reduces the time spent in gatherings, in sumposia, with others. Public discourse requires time, to read, think, and interact with others. It is...

The authors explore the properties of various types of public and private pricing on a congested road network with heterogenous users allowing for elastic demand. Heterogeneity is reprensented by a continuum of values of time. The network consists of both serial and parallel links, which allows...

This paper analyzes processes of deflation and reflation in a debt-constrained economy. Nominally rigid debt obligations could limit firms' ability to reduce the output prices in response to a negative aggregate demand shock, giving ride to an under-employment equilibrium. The standard policy...

Recent years have seen a rapid expansion of economic literature on stigma, a notion that had been widely studied in sociology in relation to social deviance. Yet the economic literature overlooks the original sociological intuition that certain consequences of stigmatization could be socially...

High inequality in human capital may result in appropriation. In anticipation, the rich may favor policies which induce a more equal distribution of human capital, such as income transfers and mandatory schooling. This paper compares several such alternatives. We find that mandatory schooling...

A growing literature has brought to our attention the importance of information transmission and aggregation for economic and political behavior. Many recent studies of cascades point to the possibility of information cascades in economies with local learning and information transmission....

Interest groups ratings have long been used by social scientists to distinguish between liberal and conservative members of Congress. It is also well known that ratings by different groups are highly correlated with one another. Here, rather than focusing on the similarities between such...