Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Social Agglomeration Forces And The City, Peter A. Luff
Social Agglomeration Forces And The City, Peter A. Luff
Library Map Prize
The presence of “agglomeration forces” in production markets is widely accepted and has been recently quantified in the economics literature. Social scientists have done little theoretical work, however, and even less quantitative work, on how the logic of agglomeration might also apply to social groups and the gains that people derive from their social interactions. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by modeling and measuring the benefits in terms of social prestige that arose from the spatial concentration of socialites in Manhattan in the 1920s. I formulate a model of location-based social status determination that illustrates why these benefits …
Convergence Towards An Optimal Currency Area In The European Union, Santiago Botto Tornielli
Convergence Towards An Optimal Currency Area In The European Union, Santiago Botto Tornielli
Harvey M. Applebaum ’59 Award
This essay uses the European Union as a case study to analyze the conditions for an optimal currency area, the regional differences that give rise to divergences from optimal conditions, and how to measure divergence. The essay reviews the extensive body of theoretical literature on optimal currency areas (OCA), analyzes the historical evidence and documents that outline the economic institutions of the EU, and performs an empirical factor analysis on different possible indicators of convergence to identify to the most important variables. In the absence of adjustment mechanisms, economic geography plays an essential role in forming an OCA because members …