firm size and geographical aggregation an empirical appraisal in industrial location this paper assesses empirically the importance of size discrimination and disaggregate data for deciding where to locate a start up concern we compare three econometric specifications using catalan data a multinomial logit with 4 and 41 alternatives provinces and comarques respectively in which firm size is the main covariate a conditional logit with 4 and 41 alternatives including attributes of the sites as well as size site interactions and a poisson model on the comarques and the full spatial choice set 942 municipalities with site specific variables our results suggest that if these two issues are ignored conclusions may be misleading we provide evidence that large and small firms behave differently and conclude that catalan firms tend to choose between comarques rather than between municipalities moreover labour intensive firms seem more likely to be located in the city of barcelona

simple strategy proof approximately walrasian mechanisms abstract this note provides an indirect analysis of the incentive properties of the walrasian mechanism it presents mechanisms under which truth telling is a dominant strategy in finite exchange economies in contrast to the walrasian mechanism and whose outcomes generically approximate walrasian ones for large economies these mechanisms provide new insights on the well know trade off between efficiency and incentive compatibility in finite economies journal of economic literature classification numbers d50 d71 d78

strategy proof exchange we consider the allocation of goods in exchange economies with a finite number of agents who may have private information about their preferences in such a setting standard allocation rules such as walrasian equilibria or rational expectations equilibria are not compatible with individual incentives we characterize the set of allocation rules which are incentive compatible or in other words the set of strategy proof social choice functions social choice functions which are strategy proof are those which can be obtained from trading according to a finite number of pre specified proportions the number of proportions which can be accommodated is proportional to the number of agents such rules are necessarily inefficient even in the limit as the economy grows

wage and employment growth in america s drug epidemic is all growth created equal the rise in drug overdose deaths in the united states since the turn of the millennium has been extraordinary a popular narrative paints a picture whereby opioid overdoses among white male less educated rural workers have been caused by reduced economic opportunities borne by such people in this article we causally test the validity of this theory by using bartik type variables to explore the relationship between local economic conditions and county opioid overdose death rates we add to the literature by exploring how both employment and wage growth in different types of industries are related to opioid overdose deaths for the population as a whole as well as for rural vs urban male vs female and white vs black populations we find mixed evidence our results confirm that wage and employment growth in industries more likely to employ low skill workers are important protective factors for rural white males however we also find evidence that economic improvements in low skill industries are just as important in protecting blacks and women against opioid overdoses and for workers in metro counties we also find evidence that employment growth in high paying industries has led to increases in opioid overdoes rates

efficiency and information aggregation in large uniform price auctions abstract we prove that the equilibria of a large interdependent value uniform price auction model where bidders have arbitrary preferences for multiple units can be approximated by a nonatomic exchange economy we show that the uniform price auction is approximately efficient with a large number of participants and asymptotically aggregates idiosyncratic bidder information into the market price more generally our analysis framework provides conditions justifying the use of nonatomic limit model approximations to analyze the large market behavior of game theoretic models we demonstrate continuity requirements on the economic primitives sufficient for the equilibrium strategies of the two models to converge as the number of participants in the finite game approaches infinity

examining the role of economic opportunity and amenities in explaining population redistribution abstract this paper develops a model of migration integrating equilibrium and disequilibrium components in which individuals and firms form rational expectations about future opportunities levels of migration are derived as functions of variations in factors influencing migrant labor demand economic opportunity and migrant labor supply residential amenities the model is used to estimate the extent to which migration in the united states over the period 1950 1980 is determined by these two classes of exogenous factors

aggregation of information in large cournot markets consider a homogeneous product market where firms have private information about an uncertain demand parameter and compete in quantities we examine the convergence properties of bayesian cournot equilibria as the economy is replicated and conclude that large cournot or almost competitive markets do not aggregate information efficiently except possibly when the production technology exhibits constant returns to scale even in a competitive market there is a welfare loss with respect to the first best outcome due to incomplete information in general nevertheless a competitive market is efficient taking as given the decentralized private information structure of the economy endogenous and costly information acquisition is examined and seen to imply that the market outcome always falls short of the first best level with decreasing returns to scale the results are also shown to be robust to the addition of extra rounds of competition which allows firms to use the information revealed by past prices explicit closed form solutions yielding comparative static results are obtained for models characterized by quadratic payoffs and affine information structures

approximately competitive equilibria in large finite economies abstract we consider exchange economies where each consumer may report or act according to any demand function provided that there exist situations that the consumer finds plausible in which the reported demand performs at least as well as the true demand we identify conditions under which as the size of the economy increases all the market clearing prices and allocations of the reported economy approximate the competitive equilibria of the true economy journal of economic literature classification numbers d51 d82

threshold strategy proofness on manipulability in large voting problems in voting problems where agents have lipschitz continuous utility functions on a multidimensional space of alternatives a voting rule is threshold strategy proof if any agent can obtain only a limited utility gain by not voting for a most preferred alternative if the number of agents is large enough for anonymous voting rules it is shown that this condition is not only implied by but is in fact equivalent to the influence of any single agent decreasing to zero as the number of agents grows if there are at least five agents the mean rule taking the average vote is shown to be the unique anonymous and unanimous voting rule that meets a lower bound with respect to the number of agents needed to obtain threshold strategy proofness

implementation in differential information economies abstract we consider the problem of implementation of social choice correspondences in differential information economies we provide necessary conditions for implementation and slightly stronger conditions which are sufficient to guarantee implementation

migration regional equilibrium and the estimation of compensating differentials in this study we have developed an improved model of net migration that encompasses both equilibrium and disequilibrium components instrumental variables fixed effects estimates of the model with time series data for 51 areas in the united states over the period 1971 1988 support the importance of both equilibrium and disequilibrium factors in migration excerpt

informational smallness and the scope for limiting information rents abstract for an incomplete information model of public good provision with interim participation constraints we show that efficient outcomes can be approximated with approximately full surplus extraction when there are many agents and each agent is informationally small the result holds even if agents payoffs cannot be unambiguously inferred from their beliefs the contrary result of neeman z neeman the relevance of private information in mechanism design j econ theory 117 2004 55 77 rests on an implicit uniformity requirement that is incompatible with the notion that agents are informationally small because there are many other agents who have information about them

on the possibility of informationally efficient markets this paper presents conditions for a resolution of the grossman stiglitz paradox of informationally efficient markets we display a market with asymmetric information where a privately revealing equilibrium obtains in a competitive framework and where incentives to acquire information are preserved as long as the correlation in traders valuations is not too large the equilibrium is efficient and the problems associated with fully revealing rational expectations equilibria are precluded without resorting necessarily to noise traders the robustness of the results to general information structures is established and the effect of market power is examined in a large market approximation to the competitive economy the model is applied to explain changes in bidding behavior in central bank liquidity auctions in the crisis period jel d82 d84 g14 e59

impact of sovereign rating changes on stock market co movements the case of latin america abstractwe aim to determine if long term foreign currency sovereign rating assessments from s p moody s and fitch for the advanced emerging latin american countries brazil mexico and chile have any significant effect on the correlation between their stock market returns in the last decade with that purpose in mind we obtain the time varying correlation by cdcc modeling using arx aparch filtered returns the analysis shows that the rating changes do not have a significant effect on the correlations in general after testing for robustness we reveal that an upgrade to an investment grade level for a country is more likely to positively diversify it from others in the region instead of creating a common positive regional investment environment results have important implications for investors and policymakers

on the failure of core convergence in economies with asymmetric information in interim economies with asymmetric information we show that the coarse core of wilson 1978 does not converge to price equilibrium allocations as the economy is replicated this failure of core convergence is a basic consequence of asymmetric information and extends to any reasonable notion of either interim core or price equilibrium

migration theories and evidence an assessment abstract this paper presents a critical survey of theories of migration their welfare and policy implications and their empirical relevance we also develop some extensions to the theory beginning with the harris and todaro ht model in particular the ht model is extended to examine risk averse behaviour within families where the migration of members of families serves to diversify risk the welfare implications of the individual migration decision and government intervention in the form of employment subsidies are examined recent evidence on international migration is presented it is shown that migration does not flow automatically in response to wage differentials characteristics of migrants and the process of self selection are found to be important determinants of the rate of migration

stability in large matching markets with complementarities labor markets can often be viewed as many to one matching markets it is well known that if complementarities are present in such markets a stable matching may not exist we study large random matching markets with couples we introduce a new matching algorithm and show that if the number of couples grows slower than the size of the market a stable matching will be found with high probability if however the number of couples grows at a linear rate with constant probability not depending on the market size no stable matching exists our results explain data from the market for psychology interns

polling mechanisms and the demand revelation problem we consider a revelation mechanism for the production of public goods a sample of consumers is drawn at random each member of the sample is asked to reveal her his preferences agents are subjected to transfers of the groves class and any surplus of taxes collected on sampled agents is redistributed to non sampled agents this polling mechanism is non parametric revealing in dominant strategies budget balanced and approximately efficient if the consumer population is large when applied to a public good with exclusion this mechanism in combination with consumer free mobility yields approximately optimal allocations

incentive compatibility and competitive allocations abstract it is shown that as the number of individuals in an economy grows the demand functions which are optimal for an agent converge to the competitive price taking demand

matching with couples stability and incentives in large markets accommodating couples has been a longstanding issue in the design of centralized labor market clearinghouses for doctors and psychologists because couples view pairs of jobs as complements a stable matching may not exist when couples are present this paper s main result is that a stable matching exists when there are relatively few couples and preference lists are suciently short relative to market size we also discuss incentives in markets with couples we relate these theoretical results to the job market for psychologists in which stable matchings exist for all years of the data despite the presence of couples

the efficiency of competitive mechanisms under private information we consider the efficiency properties of exchange economies where privately informed traders behave strategically specifically a competitive mechanism is any mapping of traders reports about their types to an equilibrium price vector and allocation of the reported economy in our model some traders may have non vanishing impact on prices and allocations regardless of the size of the economy although truthful reporting by all traders cannot be achieved we show that given any desired level of approximation there is n such that any bayesian nash equilibrium of any competitive mechanism of any private information economy with n or more traders leads with high probability to prices and allocations that are close to a competitive equilibrium of the true economy in particular allocations are approximately efficient a key assumption is that there is small probability that traders behave non strategically

market power and information revelation in dynamic trading we study a strategic model of dynamic trading where agents are asymmetrically informed over common value sources of uncertainty there is a continuum of buyers and a finite number n of sellers all buyers are uninformed while at least one seller is privately informed about the true state of the world when n 1 full information revelation never occurs in equilibrium and the only information transmission happens in the first period with n 1 the outcome depends both on the structure of the sellers information and even more importantly on the intensity of competition allowed by the existing trading rules when there is intense competition absence of clienteles information is fully and immediately revealed to the buyers in every equilibrium for n large enough regardless of the number of informed sellers on the other hand for trading arrangements characterized by less intense forms of competition presence of clienteles for any n we always have equilibria where information is never fully revealed moreover in that case when only one seller is informed for many parameter configurations there are no equilibria with full information revelation even for large n jel c72 c78 d82 d83

trade with heterogeneous prior beliefs and asymmetric information no trade theorems have shown that new information will not lead to trade when agents share the same prior beliefs this paper explores the structure of no trade theorems with heterogeneous prior beliefs it is shown how different notions of efficiency under asymmetric information ex ante interim ex post are related to agents prior beliefs as well as incentive compatible and public versions of those efficiency concepts these efficiency results are used to characterize necessary and sufficient conditions on agents beliefs for no trade theorems in different trading environments

search adverse selection and market clearing we examine a dynamic decentralized trading model with infinitesimal sellers and buyers to investigate whether or not the market fails to clear in the limit of search friction vanishing a seller who has private information about product quality and a buyer are matched to bargain over price they form a long term relationship if they reach agreement they return to the matching pool if they fail to agree or the existing relationship is dissolved the market fails to clear if and only if the ratio of agents patience over the dissolution rate exceeds a threshold

monotonicity and rationalizability in a large first price auction this paper proves that the monotonicity of bidding strategies together with the rationality of bidders implies that the winning bid in a first price auction converges to the competitive equilibrium price as the number of bidders increases wilson 1977 instead of analysing the symmetric nash equilibrium we examine rationalizable strategies bernheim 1984 pearce 1984 among the set of monotonic bidding strategies to prove that any monotonic rationalizable bidding strategy must be within a small neighbourhood of the truthful valuation of the object conditioned on the signal received by the bidder we obtain an information aggregation result similar to that of wilson 1977 while dispensing with almost all symmetric assumptions and using a milder solution concept than the nash equilibrium in particular if every bidder is ex ante identical then any rationalizable bidding strategy must be within a small neighbourhood of the symmetric nash equilibrium in a symmetric first price auction the symmetry of outcomes is implied rather than assumed copyright 2005 wiley blackwell

what drives migration moves to urban areas in spain evidence from the great recession during the great recession international emigration skyrocketed while internal migration strongly declined however when the focus is on migration to the larger urban areas in spain an increase i

correlated equilibrium as an expression of bayesian rationality if it is common knowledge that the players in a game are bayesian utility maximizers who treat uncertainty about other players actions like any other uncertainty then the outcome is necessarily a correlated equilibrium random strategies appear as an expression of each player s uncertainty about what the others will do not as the result of willful randomization use is made of the common prior assumption according to which differences in probability assessments by different individuals are due to the different information that they have where information may be interpreted broadly to include experience upbringing and genetic makeup copyright 1987 by the econometric society

implementation in economies with a continuum of agents we study a general implementation problem for exchange economies with a continuum of players and private information and test the robustness of the results for sequences of approximating finite economies assuming that the designer knows the distribution of the characteristics in the economy we consider continuous and unique implementation in both its equilibrium and dominant strategies versions and obtain results for general self selective first and second best allocations an upper hemicontinuity property of bayesian equilibria of approximating economies for continuous mechanisms is demonstrated using this we can for example conclude that if a given continuous mechanism implements uniquely a walrasian allocation in the continuum economy then all bayesian equilibria of large approximation economies will with probability close to one yield an allocation which is almost ex post pareto optimal

feasible and continuous implementation there has been a great deal of research in recent years investigating the question of whether or not there exist institutions game forms for which the set of equilibria will coincide with the set of walrasian equilibria in this paper we show the existence of a game form that is feasible both for equilibrium and disequilibrium strategies continuous and for which the set of nash equilibria coincides with the set of constrained walrasian equilibria for all pure exchange economies the game form allows agents to behave strategically both with respect to their preferences and their initial endowments

private information in large economies this paper examines the effect of private information in large economies we show that in a model with stochastic information structures the restrictions imposed on allocations by the presence of private information disappear in large economies we also show that for a large class of direct mechanisms the incentive for any agent to falsely report private information goes to zero as the number of agents becomes large these results provide an informational smallness analog to existing quantity smallness limiting results in the literature

asymptotic efficiency in large exchange economies with asymmetric information the authors provide conditions on an exchange economy with asymmetric information that guarantee that when the economy is replicated sufficiently often there will be an allocation that is incentive compatible individually rational and nearly efficient the main theorem covers both the case in which aggregate uncertainty remains when the economy is replicated and the case in which replication eliminates aggregate uncertainty in addition the authors demonstrate how their theorem does or does not apply to standard asymmetric information problems such as the buyer s bid double auction problem akerlof s lemons problem and insurance with asymmetric information copyright 1992 by the econometric society

the artistic dividend urban artistic specialisation and economic development implications over the past two decades urban and regional policy makers have increasingly looked to the arts and culture as an economic panacea especially for the older urban core the arts regional economic contribution is generally measured by totalling the revenue of larger arts organisations associated expenditures by patrons and multiplier effects this approach underestimates the contributions of creative artists to a regional economy because of high rates of self employment and direct export activity because artists work enhances the design production and marketing of products and services in other sectors and because artists induce innovation on the part of suppliers artists create import substituting entertainment options for regional consumers and spend large shares of their own incomes on local arts output the paper takes a labour centred view of the arts economy hypothesising that many artists choose a locale in which to work often without regard to particular employers but in response to a nur

dynamic correlation analysis of financial contagion evidence from asian markets we apply a dynamic conditional correlation model to nine asian daily stock return data series from 1990 to 2003 the empirical evidence confirms a contagion effect by analyzing the correlation coefficient series we identify two phases of the asian crisis the first shows an increase in correlation contagion the second shows a continued high correlation herding statistical analysis of the correlation coefficients also finds a shift in variance during the crisis period casting doubt on the benefit of international portfolio diversification evidence shows that international sovereign credit rating agencies play a significant role in shaping the structure of dynamic correlations in the asian markets

imperfect competition and efficiency in lemons markets this article studies the impact of competition on the degree of inefficiency in lemons markets more precisely we characterise the second best mechanism i e the optimal mechanism with private information in a stylised lemons market with finite numbers of buyers and sellers we then study the relationship between the degree of efficiency of the second best mechanism and market competitiveness a general message of our results is that increasing competition may not help lemons markets in some circumstances moreover increasing competition beyond a certain degree increases the distance between the first best and second best levels of efficiency

wages rents and the quality of life this study focuses on the role of wages and rents in allocating workers to locations with various quantities of amenities the theory demonstrates that if the amenity is also productive then the sign of the wage gradient is unclear while the rent gradient is positive the theory is extended to include the housing market and nontraded goods these extensions require little modification of the conclusion the empirical work on wages shows that the regional wage differences can be explained largely by these local attributes with the use of site price data implicit prices are estimated and quality of life rankings for the cities are computed

incomplete information incentive compatibility and the core abstract we consider an exchange economy in which agents possess private information at the time of engaging in state contingent contracts while communication of private information is permitted the true information state is not verifiable the enforcement of contracts is therefore limited by incentive compatibility constraints we formalize a notion of the core for such an economy our analysis can be viewed as an attempt to incorporate incentive compatibility in the coarse core of r wilson 1978 econometrica46 807 816 or as an attempt to introduce coalitional contracts in the notion of incentive efficiency of b holmstrom and r myerson 1983 econometrica51 1799 1819 while there are some special cases in which the incentive compatible core is non empty our main result shows that is not generally true journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c71 c72 d51

externalities in economies with imperfect information and incomplete markets this paper presents a simple general framework for analyzing externalities in economies with incomplete markets and imperfect infonnation by identifying the pecuniary effects of these externalities that net out the paper simplifies the problem of determining when tax interventions are pareto improving the approach indicates that such tax interventions almost always exist and that equilibria in situations of imperfect information are rarely constrained pareto optima it can also lead to simple tests based on readily observable indicators of the efficacy of particular tax policies in situations involving adverse selection signaling moral hazard incomplete contingent claims markets and queue rationing equilibria traditional discussions of externalities have emphasized the distinction between technological externalities in which the action of one individual or firm directly affects the utility or profit ofanother and pecuniary externalities in which one individual s or firm s actions affect another only through effects on prices while the presence of technological externalities imply in general that a competitive equilibrium may not be pareto efficient pecuniary externalities hy themselves are not a source of inefficiency the fact that prices change has of course important consequences there are both distributional and allocational effects but the distribution effects net out gains for example hy firms whose prices increase are precisely offset by losses e g to individuals who must pay higher prices and there are no welfare losses from the allocation effects as long as the price changes involved are small if firms are maximizing profits and individuals are maximizing utility both facing prices that correctly refiect opportunity costs then standard envelope theorem arguments imply that changes in profits or utility induced by changes in allocations resulting from any small change in prices are negligible

perfect competition in asymmetric information economies compatibility of efficiency and incentives the idea of perfect competition for an economy with asymmetric information is formalized via an idiosyncratic signal process in which the private signals of almost every individual agent can influence only a negligible group of agents and the individual agents relevant signals are essentially pairwise independent conditioned on the true states of nature thus there is no incentive for an individual agent to manipulate her private information the existence of incentive compatible ex post walrasian allocations is shown for such a perfectly competitive asymmetric information economy with or without common values consequently the conflict between incentive compatibility and pareto eciency is resolved exactly and its asymptotic version is derived for a sequence of large but finite private information economies

generic existence of completely revealing equilibria for economies with uncertainty when prices convey information conditions which imply the existence of strict rational expectations equilibria for most static pure exchange economies where prices convey information about the state of the world are analyzed information is aggregated and transmitted by prices because agents have different initial information and maximize the conditional expectation of state dependent utility functions major results state that if with probability one agents characteristics do not vary too much as the state of the world varies then generically there exist equilibrium price functions which reveal all initial information more precisely if the support of the image measure is contained in a compact c1 manifold satisfying some technical conditions which is of sufficiently low dimension relative to the number of commodities then existence of completely revealing equilibria is generic any economy satisfying these assumptions can be approximated by a sequence of economies which also obey these assumptions and have completely revealing equilibrium price functions slight perturbations do not destroy the existence property

limit properties of equilibrium allocations of walrasian strategic games abstract we characterize the set of equilibrium allocations of walrasian strategic games where each agent manipulates his strategic demand map to his benefit we first show that for a finite economy the set of cournot nash equilibrium allocations will be large and the equilibrium allocation map will not in general possess a closed graph property then we show that with appropriate smoothness conditions and the regularity condition on the mean aggregate limit excess demand map true walrasian allocations in a large economy can be claimed to be sufficiently robust against strategic manipulations of agents demand maps

equilibria and incentives in private information economies abstract this paper considers three solution concepts in a large private information economy namely walrasian expectations equilibrium private core and insurance equilibrium it shows that these three concepts coincide with each other when the agents are informationally negligible in such an economy in contrast to the finite agent setting one can construct a large private information economy in which incentive compatibility fails completely in the sense that almost every agent in any walrasian expectations equilibrium private core insurance equilibrium allocation has the incentive to misreport her type

on migration and risk in ldcs the authors develop the hypothesis that aversion to risk rather than expectations of higher income is the primary motivation for rural urban migration in developing countries this hypothesis maintains that an optimizing risk averse small farmer family will try to place a family member in the urban sector in order to diversify its income portfolio an additional hypothesis related to risk is also considered at the individual rather than the family level annotation

college assignment as a large contest abstract we develop a model of college assignment as a large contest wherein students with heterogeneous learning costs compete for seats at vertically differentiated colleges through the acquisition of productive human capital we use a continuum model to approximate the outcomes of a game with large but finite sets of colleges and students the continuum approximation lends tractability to a rich model for studying investment incentives in rank order competitions by incorporating two common families of affirmative action mechanisms into our model admissions preferences and quotas we can show that legal admissions preference schemes and illegal quotas have the same sets of equilibria including identical outcomes and investment strategies

equilibrium allocations of walrasian preference games following hurwicz 1972 we think of an allocation mechanism as a set of rules governing the behavior of economic agents given the economic environment initial allocations consumer preferences and the technology the behavior prescribed by the allocation mechanism determines future allocations thus we may think of an allocation mechanism as a mapping from a set of economic environments to a set of allocations a question which often comes up in discussions of allocation mechanisms is whether or not there are incentives for the economic agents to follow the prescribed rules is the mechanism incentive compatible this question has received considerable attention in the public finance literature where the concern has been primarily with whether or not consumers will reveal their true prefrences as prescribed by mechanisms designed for the allocation of public goods see for example samuelson 1969 hurwicz 1972 presented a game theoretic structure for the analysis of incentive compatibility the economic agents are the players and their reported characteristics preferences endowments or technologies are the strategy variables when the strategies are played a reported environment is characterized and the allocation mechanism under consideration determines the resulting allocation this allocation as evaluated by the true consumer preferences is the payoff to the strategies played hurwicz calls the mechanism individually incentive compatible if the vector of true characteristics is a nash equilibrium strategy vector for this game hurwicz 1972 first used this structure to investigate the incentive compatibility of the walrasian mechanism he considered pure exchange economies with finitely many consumers in which initial endowments were taken to be known by all and thus not subject to misreporting thus preferences were the only characteristics reported strategically he found that

incentives in the probabilistic serial mechanism abstract the probabilistic serial mechanism bogomolnaia and moulin 2001 9 is ordinally efficient but not strategy proof we study incentives in the probabilistic serial mechanism for large assignment problems we establish that for a fixed set of object types and an agent with a given expected utility function if there are sufficiently many copies of each object type then reporting ordinal preferences truthfully is a weakly dominant strategy for the agent regardless of the number of other agents and their preferences the non manipulability and the ordinal efficiency of the probabilistic serial mechanism support its implementation instead of random serial dictatorship in large assignment problems

rural bound determinants of metro to non metro migration in the united states a general global precept is that agglomeration forces lead to migration from rural to urban areas yet for much of the time since the early 1970s more people have moved from metro to nonmetro u s counties the underlying causes of this pattern have changed over time with economic shocks and changing household preferences for instance the post 2000 period has seen a significant decline in domestic migration rates a significant increase in commodity prices that favor rural areas and potential changes in the valuation of natural amenities that would affect migration this article investigates the determinants of u s gross migration from metro to nonmetro counties and nonmetro to metro counties for the 1995 2000 and 2005 2009 periods in order to compare the differences in rural to urban and urban to rural migration as well as compare the 1990s to the 2005 2009 periods more specifically the present study extends the literature by more broadly examining the underlying factors associated with deconcentration and economic restructuring arguments of metro to nonmetro migration the article uses 1 extensive county to county migration flows and 2 the utility maximization theory that extends the framework of a discrete choice model the results show that population density distance to urban areas industry mix employment growth natural amenities and percentage of older people are key factors underlying these migration patterns we also find a slight fading of effects of natural amenities and population density and a slight increase in the effects of wage and employment growth from 2005 2009

the role of amenities and quality of life in rural economic growth a structural model of regional economic growth is estimated using data for 2243 rural u s counties five indices designed to capture specific amenity and quality of life characteristics are constructed using fifty four separate indicators results suggest that amenity characteristics can be organized into consistent and meaningful empirical measures that move beyond ad hoc descriptions of amenities in addition to insights into the influence of local characteristics ranging from tax burdens to income distribution on regional economic growth results suggest that predictable relationships between amenities quality of life and local economic performance exist

informational size and incentive compatibility with aggregate uncertainty in mclean and postlewaite econometrica 56 1992 p 2421 we analyzed pure exchange economies with asymmetrically informed agents we defined a notion of informational size and showed that when the aggregate information of all agents resolves nearly all the uncertainty regarding the state of nature the conflict between incentive compatibility and ex post efficiency can be made small if agents have sufficiently small informational size this paper investigates the relationship between informational size and efficiency for the case in which nontrivial aggregate uncertainty is present i e when significant uncertainty about the world persists even when the information of all agents is known

information aggregation in a large multi stage market game abstract a three stage market game mechanism is devised that is simple actions are quantities and outcomes are determined by arithmetic operations that do not depend on details of the economy and achieves efficiency in a two divisible good pure exchange setting with potential information aggregation after an entry stage agents make offers which are provisional for all but a small randomly selected group then those offers are announced and everyone else makes new offers with payoffs determined by a shapley shubik market game for a finite and large number of players there exists an almost ex post efficient equilibrium conditions for uniqueness are also provided

core convergence with asymmetric information we analyze the ex ante incentive compatible core for replicated private information economies we show that any allocation in the core when the economy is replicated sufficiently often is approximately walrasian for the associated arrow debreu economy

implementation of walrasian expectations equilibria in an exchange economy with differentially informed traders non exclusivity of information nei is the condition that each trader s private information be perfectly predictable by an outside observer who has observed the private information of all other traders nei is one of a set of conditions which taken together are sufficient for the implementability of fully revealing expectations equilibria here we show that this condition is in fact necessary for the weak implementation of a much broader class of walrasian equilibria herein called expectations equilibria

on bayesian implementable allocations this paper identifies several social choice correspondences which are and are not fully implementable in economic environments when agents are incompletely informed about the environment we show that in contrast to results in the case of complete information neither efficient allocations nor core allocations define implementable social choice correspondences we also identify conditions under which the rational expectations equilibrium correspondence is implementable we extend the concepts of fair allocations and lindahl allocations to economies with incomplete information and show that envy free allocations and lindahl allocations are implementable under some conditions while fair allocations are not

informational size and incentive compatibility we examine a general equilibrium model with asymmetrically informed agents the presence of asymmetric information generally presents a conflict between incentive com patibility and pareto efficiency we present a notion of informational size and show that the conflict between incentive compatibility and efficiency can be made arbitrarily small if agents are of sufficiently small informational size the incompatibility of pareto efficiency and incentive compatibility is a central theme in economics and game theory the issues associated with this incompatibility are particularly important in the design of resource allocation mechanisms in the presence of asymmetrically informed agents where the need to acquire information from agents in order to compute efficient outcomes and the incentives agents have to misrepresent that information for personal gain come into conflict despite a large literature that focuses on these issues there has been little work aimed at understanding those situations in which informational asymmetries are quantitatively important virtually every transaction is characterized by some asymmetry of information any investor who buys or sells a share of stock generally knows something rel evant to the value of the share that is not known to the person on the other side of the transaction in order to focus on more salient aspects of the problem many models rightly ignore the incentive problems associated with informa tional asymmetries in the belief that for the problem at hand agents are infor mationally small however few researchers have investigated the circumstances under which an analysis that ignores these incentive problems will yield results similar to those obtained when these problems are fully accounted for in this paper we study a class of mechanism design problems our goal is to formalize informational size in a way that when agents are informationally small 1 early versions of this paper circulated under the titles informational smallness and pareto effi ciency and informational smallness and incentive compatibility we thank jacques cremer dean foster andreu mas colell stephen morris david schmeidler and particularly faruk gul for help ful conversations and rajiv vohra for a very careful reading we also thank the numerous partici pants in seminars at which this paper was presented for helpful comments we also thank an editor and the referees for very helpful comments and thank ichiro obara for pointing out an error in an earlier version postlewaite gratefully acknowledges support from the national science foundation

fair allocations in large economies the purpose of this paper is the study of problems of equity in an economy with many agents conditions are given under which every equitable and pareto optimal allocation is a competitive equilibrium with equal incomes for all agents the results are also of potential relevance for the literature on incentive compatibility since the allocations that are obained through incentive mechanisms in large economies turn out to be equitable

informational robustness of competitive equilibria abstract consider an exchange economy with complete information we perturb this economy by assuming that each agent s observation about the true state of the world is noisy the paper investigates the robustness of equilibria of the complete information economy with respect to incomplete information we provide conditions under which complete information equilibria are limits of equilibria of the economies with incomplete information as the noise in the signal converges to zero journal of economic literature classification numbers d51 d82

consumption smoothing migration and marriage evidence from rural india a significant proportion of migration in low income countries particularly in rural areas is composed of moves by women for the purpose of marriage we seek to explain these mobility patterns by examining marital arrangements among indian households in particular we hypothesize that the marriage of daughters to locationally distant dispersed yet kinship related households is a manifestation of implicit interhousehold contractual arrangements aimed at mitigating income risks and facilitating consumption smoothing in an environment characterized by information costs and spatially covariant risks analysis of longitudinal south indian village data lends support to the hypothesis marriage cum migration contributes significantly to a reduction in the variability of household food consumption farm households afflicted with more variable profits tend to engage in longer distance marriage cum migration the hypothesized and observed marriage cum migration patterns are in dissonance with standard models of marriage or migration that are concerned primarily with search costs and static income gains

the rate at which a simple market converges to efficiency as the number of traders increases an asymptotic result for optimal trading mechanisms private information in an independent private values market provides incentives to traders to manipulate equilibrium prices strategically this strategic behavior precludes ex post efficient market performance increasing the number of traders improves the efficiency of some trading mechanisms by enabling them to better utilize the private information traders bids and offers reveal this paper shows that the expected inefficiency of optimally designed mechanisms relative to ex post efficient allocations decreases almost quadratically as the number of traders increases

rating the rating agencies anticipating currency crises or debt crises abstract we revisit the question whether sovereign ratings predict financial crises in line with previous studies we find that ratings do not predict currency crises and are instead downgraded ex post however the likelihood of currency crisis and the implied probability of sovereign default are not closely linked in emerging markets post 1994 when debt crises are defined as sovereign distress when spreads are higher than 1000 basis points or 10 percentage points we find that access to international capital markets is reduced by half in addition although sovereign distress events last for typically 5 2 consecutive months they can persist for longer periods up to nine quarters finally lagged ratings and ratings changes including negative outlooks and credit watches are useful in anticipating sovereign distress

locational choice of afdc recipients within california a conditional logit analysis abstract this paper examines factors that influence migration of afdc recipients within california a county level conditional logit model is used to analyze the impact of cost adjusted benefits on intrastate moves during recipients first year of welfare participation costs of living particularly housing costs differ considerably across counties of california yet the welfare benefit is set at the state level this creates the potential for variation in the purchasing power of the welfare benefit if a family chooses to move variation in cost of living is shown to have a significant effect on migration patterns of afdc recipients estimates suggest that a 150 decrease in fair market rent results in 15 more migration to the county recipients migration is more responsive to cost of living than migration of the general population