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...

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...

A popular theory of business cycles is that they are driven by animal spirits: shifts in expectations brought on by sunspots. Two prominent examples are Diamond (JPE, 1982) and Howitt and McAfee (AER, 1992). We show that these models have unique equilibria if there are payoff shocks of any size....

While the paper examined the effect of different tax regimes on the Israeli automobile market, the main contribution of this paper is the methodology it employs. As demonstrated, owr framework provides a methodology for examining the effects of changes in tax regimes in differential product...

The paper characterizes the following empirical relations between firms in an industry and between industries: (a) How the wage hierarchy of industries and that of firms (within each of the different industries) changes over time; (b) The relation of the average firm's wage to its size and the...

A long-standing conjecture is that winner-take-all games such as patent races lead to the survival of risk-takers and the extinction of risk-averters. In many species a winner-take-all game determines the males' right to reproduce, and the same argument suggests that males will evolve to be...