This paper discusses three aspects of urbanization: the effect of urbanization (that is, aggregate urban population growth) on agglomeration, the discontinuity of urban population partition among urban areas, and the failure of laissez-faire to induce the emergence of new urban areas...

Nash equilibrium is often interpreted as a steady state in which each player holds the correct expectations about the other players` behavior and acts rationally. This paper investigates the robustness of this interpretation when players` preferences are affected by their forecasts about the...

This paper develops extensive new data on the legal independence of central banks in 26 former socialist economies (FSE). This data is constructed using the codification system for measuring legal independence developed in Cukierman, Webb and Neyapti (1992) and in chapter 19 of Cukierman (1992)....

The paper generalizes Blackwell's theorem, according to which the welfare effects of an improvement in information are positive to certain class equilibrium production economies. The consumer preferences in this class of economies exhibit either constant relative risk of constant risk aversion...

The Israeli high tech sector is widely regarded as a hotbed of cutting-edge technologies, and as the growth engine of the Israeli economy in the nineties and beyond. In this paper we present a close-up portrait of innovation in Israel for the past 30 years, with the aid of highly detailed patent...

We remove the aggregate US-wide component in US state level disposable income and consumption and find that state-specific consumption exhibits substantially less excess sensitivity to lagged state-specific disposable income than if the aggregate component is not controlled for. This is evidence...

In dynamic models with multiple equilibria, a central question is how agents coordinate their expectations on a particular outcome. Many dynamic models feature endogenous flexibility: at some cost, agents can adjust their behavior more quickly (e.g., in response to changing market conditions)....

The paradigm of a direct democracy in which individuals vote direclty on the issues is widely used in the recent political economy literature that explicitly models the interaction between economic and political behavior. Yet, in most existing democracies policy decisions are delegated to...