It is common to explain the market failure in efficiently distributing the population among urban areas by externalities associated with unpriced transportation congestion and external scale economies in the supply of private and public goods. Consequently, in prescribing the appropriate...

We consider zero-monotonic environments with transferable utility and propose a simple non-cooperative game to determine how the surplus generated by cooperation is to be shared. First, the players bid for the right to propose a sharing of the surplus. Second, after the winner pays the bids, she...

The extent of taxation and distribution policy is generally determined at a political-economy equilibrium by a balance between those who gain and those who lose from a more extensive tax-transfer policy. In a stylized model of migration and humain capital formation we find, somewhat against...

Migration has important implications for the financial soundness of the pe nsion system, which is an important pillar of the welfare state. While it is common sense to expect that young migrants, even if low-skilled, can help society pay the benefits to the currently elderly, it may nevertheless...

We study the effects of local status, where workers compare their wage to the wage of other workers within the same firm. We assume a competitive labor market with unobservable effort, where firms condition wages on output as incentive for effort. If workers who care about status are also more...

In this paper we argue that the impact of external scale economies and diseconomies on city size is not nearly as clear-cut as it is tacitly believed in urban economics. Similarly, that city-size distortions are not caused by externalities alone. Noncovexity, which prevents establishing the...