This paper investigates the economics of the transition of land from rural to urban use. A simple model is employed to examine the developer's problem: When and at what destiny should vacant land be developed to maximize the present value of the Land? A series of rules emerges from the analysis to the timing and density of new development. In the latter half of the paper, the rules are tested against recent Canadian experience and peform well.

This paper investigates the economics of the transition of land from rural to urban use. A simple model is employed to examine the developer's problem: When and at what destiny should vacant land be developed to maximize the present value of the Land? A series of rules emerges from the analysis to the timing and density of new development. In the latter half of the paper, the rules are tested against recent Canadian experience and peform well.

A multiperiod, general equilibrium model of the labor market is developed in which risk-averse workers are faced with job-related uncertainty and labor turnover is costly. If a worker is unlucky and suffers a bad job match, he quits and joins another firm, hoping that he will like its work environment more. Because the quality of a job match is unobservable, workers cannot insure against the risk of a bad match. The firm provides implicit insurance against job dissatisfaction, typically by paying workers more than their net marginal products in their early years with the firm and less subsequently. Since the probabilities of the insured-against events (the quit rates over time) are affected by the amount of such insurance provided, this implicit insurance is characterized by moral hazard. Individuals quit when in the absence of insurance they would not. The equilibrium contract balances out efficiency in risk bearing with efficiency in turnover incentives. We show that the equilibrium contract is not (constrained) efficient and indicate why.

I. An example, 473.—II. The generality of the Henry George Theorem, 477.—III. On using land rents as a measure of the benefits from public goods, 490.—IV. Competitive attainability of a Pareto optimal distribution of economic activity, 496.—V. Concluding comments, 498.

When workers' search efforts are unobservable, the provision of insurance against firm-specific shocks adversely affects their incentives to find better jobs. In consequence, the equilibrium contract prescribes low wages and underemployment to encourage workers to leave low-productivity firms; and it employs both quits and layoffs to induce separations, with the mix depending both on the relative efficiency of on- and off-the-job search and on the search-incentive effects of layoffs.