Micro-foundations of National Accounting

Sustainability and National Accounting

The micro-foundations of email communication networks

The popular and scientific literature has been discussing the advent of ‘big data’ with a measure of excitement and apprehension. For the first time in history, it seems, every breath we take, every move we make, someone’s watching us. But beyond their unprecedented volumes and the anxieties they raise, new communication data have a less obvious aspect, in so far as they are (arguably) of a fun...

Emergent Cities: Micro-Foundations of Zipf’s Lawt

The Micro Foundations of Presidential Approval

The “miracle of aggregation” has become the key to understanding how an uninterested and uninformed electorate can produce systematic and responsive presidential approval. This paper, however, presents a set of theoretical considerations, which predict that not only do the least informed contribute to aggregate measures of presidential approval, but that the most and least informed update their...

Emergent Cities: Micro-foundations of Zipf’s Law†

The tendency for human beings, economic firms and social institutions to locate together has been the subject of intellectual inquiry for centuries. People and firms are not spread ubiquitously across the globe but have a powerful tendency to organize in well-defined geographic units, cities. First Auerbach (1913) and then Zipf (1941; 1949) observed a striking regularity in this process, noting...