The main item of agreement between the ‘new’ and ‘old’ economic geography is the role of increasing returns in regional economic development. This provides a focal point for the model of this paper, which aims to highlight the existence of a ‘third way’ somewhere between the analysis provided by these two competing modes of explanation. Increasing returns are represented by the Verdoorn Law lin...

Conventional wisdom attributes the severity of mortality in poorer countries to widespread poverty and inadequate living conditions. This paper considers the possibility that persistent poverty may arise, in turn, from a high incidence of mortality. Endogenous mortality risk is introduced in a two-period overlapping generations model: probability of survival from the ̄rst period to the next dep...

It is not easy to summarize Ned Phelps’s monumental contribution to economics. A first impression is likely to be of a vast array of original concepts and models: the “natural rate of unemployment” and the expectations-augmented Phillips curve (1967, 1968, 1971), the “island” parable of search unemployment (1968, 1969, 1970), “incentive/efficiency wages” (1968), optimal inflation targeting over...