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Why are human societies unstable? Theories based on the observation of recurring patterns in historical data indicate that economic inequality, as well as social factors are key drivers. So far, models of this phenomenon are more…
Most decision theories, including expected utility theory, rank dependent utility theory and cumulative prospect theory, assume that investors are only interested in the distribution of returns and not in the states of the economy in which…
Climate change-associated disasters have become a significant concern, principally when affecting urban areas. Assessing these regions' resilience to strengthen their disaster management is crucial, especially in the areas vulnerable to…
Estimating the capabilities, or inputs of production, that drive and constrain the economic development of urban areas has remained a challenging goal. We posit that capabilities are instantiated in the complexity and sophistication of…
Renewable resources are starting to constitute a growing portion of the total generation mix of the power system. A key difference between renewables and traditional generators is that many renewable resources are managed by individuals,…
We show that a large effective number of commodities can be a source of equilibrium stability and uniqueness: expanding substitution opportunities strengthens aggregate substitution effects. We study finite dated-commodity exchange…
Against the background of renewed interest in vertical support policies targeting specific industries or technologies, we investigate the effects of vertical vs. horizontal policies in a combinatorial model of economic development. In the…
This paper investigates the impacts of major natural resource discoveries since 1960 on life expectancy in the nations that they were resource poor prior to the discoveries. Previous literature explains the relation between nations wealth…
Magic quantum states (non-stabilizer states) play a pivotal role in fault-tolerant quantum computation. Simultaneously, random resources have emerged as a key element in various randomized techniques within contemporary quantum science. In…
In order to account for large variance and fat tail of damage by natural disaster, we study a simple model by combining distributions of disaster and population/property with their spatial correlation. We assume fat-tailed or power-law…
At what level should government or companies support research? This complex multi-faceted question encompasses such qualitative bonus as satisfying natural human curiosity, the quest for knowledge and the impact on education and culture,…
In this paper, making use of recent statistical physics techniques and models, we address the specific role of randomness in financial markets, both at the micro and the macro level. In particular, we review some recent results obtained…
Unexpected increases of natural resource prices can generate rents, value that should be recovered by the State to minimize inefficiencies, avoid arbitrary discrimination between citizens and keep a sustainable trajectory. As a case study…
This paper develops a political-economy theory of statehood without capacity. I argue that under specific institutional and geopolitical conditions, a polity can become trapped in an equilibrium of nominal statehood: a state in which claims…
This paper aims to study the impact of public and private investments on the economic growth of developing countries. The study uses the panel data of 39 developing countries covering the periods 1990-2019. The study was based on the…
This paper analyzes whether a minimum wage should be used for redistribution on top of taxes and transfers. I characterize optimal redistribution for a government with three policy instruments -- labor income taxes and transfers, corporate…
Understanding the microeconomic details of technological catch-up processes offers great potential for informing both innovation economics and development policy. We study the economic transition of the PR China from an agrarian country to…
This paper studies politically feasible policy solutions to inequities in local public goods provision. I focus in particular on the entwined issues of high property taxes, geographic income disparities, and inequalities in public education…
In most of the recent literature on state capacity, the significance of wars in state-building assumes that threats from foreign countries generate common interests among domestic groups, leading to larger investments in state capacity.…
City-size distributions follow an approximate power law in various countries despite high volatility in relative city sizes over time. Our empirical evidence for the United States and Japan indicates that the scaling law stems from a…