Consider any investor who fears ruin facing any set of investments that satisfy no-arbitrage. Before investing, he can purchase information about the state of nature in the form of an information structure. Given his prior, information structure alpha is more informative than information...

In the lifetime of the Journal of Economic Geography geographers and economists have followed diverging paths to the study of the location of economic activity which, paradoxically, have resulted in very similar spatial configurations: a world dominated by large metropoli, where intermediate and...

This paper proposes a simple theory of a system of cities that decomposes the determinants of the city size distribution into three main components: efficiency, amenities, and frictions. Higher efficiency and better amenities lead to larger cities, but also to greater frictions through...

Top-down and bottom up development policies have been generally sold as two irreconcilable ends of the development intervention spectrum. Top-down policies, solidly based in micro- and macroeconomic theories, but lacking the adequate flexibility and ‘place-awareness’ to respond to local...

This paper examines whether, given the increasing salience of subnational governments, political decentralisation has an impact on overall economic performance. It uses panel data analyses in order to determine the association between a number of the different indices of political...

This paper examines whether differences in welfare regimes shape the incentives to work and get educated. Using microeconomic data for more than 100,000 European individuals, the results show that welfare regimes make a difference for wages and education. First, people- and household-based...

There is a high degree of sex-typing in young children's occupational aspirations and this has consequences for subsequent occupational segregation. Sociologists typically attribute early sex-differences in occupational preferences to gender socialization. Yet we still know surprisingly little...

Consider the problem of information disclosure for a planner who faces two agents interacting in a state-dependent multi-action prisoners' dilemma. We find conditions under which the planner can make use of his superior information by disclosing some of it to the agents, and conditions under...

Our basic premise is that fund managers performance is related to superior information about an asset payoff. We investigate the relationship between managerial skills and trading behavior within a two-period rational expectation equilibrium (REE) model where agents trade on private information...

In this paper we study the drawdown status of hedge funds as a hedge fund characteristic related to performance. A hedge fund's drawdown status is the decile to which the fund belongs in the industry's drawdown distribution (at a given point in time). Economic reasoning suggests that both the...