This dissertation uses agent-based simulation to study markets in ways that depart from the Walrasian tradition, and to vindicate Adam Smith’s beliefs about the power of the division of labor to enhance productivity, which mainstream economics has neglected because Walrasian equilibrium is...

For some reason, economists are less willing to advocate open migration than free trade, even though the traditional free trade models, such as Ricardian comparative advantage and Heckscher-Ohlin, cross-apply to migration. In fact, however, the case for open migration is stronger than the case...

While mainstream economics assumes that firms are always on the production frontier, there is an evolutionary interpretation of competition according to which firms have different degrees of what Leibenstein (1964) called quot;X-efficiency,quot; and competition selects for higher X-efficiency....

Open borders, in the sense of the abolition of policies restricting migration, would cause billions of people to migrate, and result in almost a doubling of world GDP. Based on a model that stresses human capital as a determinant of the wealth and poverty of nations, but which also has a spatial...

Using the BEEPS, a firm survey, this paper explores whether factors related to institutions account for the observed development gradient in the former Soviet countries of Europe and Central Asia. Some responses suggest, paradoxically, that institutions-related transactions costs are larger...

Many people participate in religion "for the community." This motive can be better understood, first, by taking from the recent "social capital" literature the insight that social ties are economic assets, and second, by using the analytical tools of game theory to show how social capital can be...