This note argues that the competitive paradigm of neoclassical economics breaks down in the presence of constant returns to scale (CRS). With CRS, all goods can be produced at identical costs by all economic agents, making self-production a feasible alternative to market production. In the...

The introduction and widespread use of credit cards increases trading efficiency but, by also increasing the velocity of money, it causes inflation, in the absence of monetary intervention. If the monetary authority attempts to restore pre-credit card price levels by reducing the money supply,...

Recruiting agents, or "programs" costly screen "applicants" in matching processes, and congestion in a market increases with the number of applicants to be screened. To combat this externality that applicants impose on programs, application costs can be used as a Pigouvian tax. Higher costs...

I embed a electricity certificate system, mandating that a certain fraction of total electricity production must come from renewable sources, in a stylized competitive economy and derive a general equilibrium cost-benefit rule from perturbing the regulation. The welfare consequences (ignoring...

This paper studies the problem of accumulating heterogeneous capital goods in an economy with imperfect markets populated by boundedly rational agents. It relaxes classical assumptions about information and cognition. The agents are not capable of computing an equilibrium path to steady state....

This paper characterizes the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of a symmetric, pure exchange economy with two goods and N agents with uniformly distributed preferences and identical endowments. Relaxing the auctioneer assumption, but maintaining a global price rule, sequentially random pairwise...

I demonstrate a straightforward but apparently widely unrecognized implication of the standard requirements for perfect competition: an economy in which consumers can choose to learn is generally not perfectly competitive. In particular, if endogenous welfare relevant learning is feasible, the...

Large data centers enjoy government support in many countries. These centers are not laborintensive, but energy-intensive, thus tending to push up electricity prices and possibly crowding out labor-intensive firms. In addition, when owned by multinational companies, profits are difficult to tax...

Recruiting agents, or "programs" costly screen “applicants” in matching processes, and congestion in a market increases with the number of applicants to be screened. To combat this externality that applicants impose on programs, application costs can be used as a Pigouvian tax. Higher costs...