This a conceptual paper concerning the relation between innovativeness and monopoly rent/abnormal earnings. It discusses how these concepts can be measured and proposes that abnormal earnings are the result differentiation, by innovativeness (monopoly rent) or branding, by underor overvalued assets, or by imperfect market information (value irrelevance). Specifically, innovativeness as a driver...

This Briefing Paper describes the spatial pattern of housing association rents across England in the first year of the rent-restructuring regime. It examines the extent to which housing associations' current average rents for given property sizes differ within each local authority area; whether there is a geographical pattern in these differences across the country; whether rents within each pr...

In this paper, we analyze a multiple winner rent-seeking contest where the number of winners is set by a self-interested regulator. The winners receive a license to compete in a market. The structure of competition in the market influences the number of winners through the preferences of the regulator. The model indicates that Cournot competitors can be better off than firms that are able to co...

Rent control is an economic abomination. It diverts investments away from residential rent units, it leads to their deterioration, it is responsible for urban decay such as in the South Bronx, it does not help poor tenants, it is a horrendous means of income redistribution. Yet this economic regulation is beloved of intellectuals (hot beds of pro rent control sentiment are Berkeley, Ann Arbor a...

This paper adds to the empirical literature on rent control. We hypothesize that rent control affects commute times. New Jersey census tract data (from the Urban Institute/Geolytics Neighborhood Change Database) show a positive and statistically significant relationship between rent control and commute times for 1980, 1990 and 2000. For 1980 and 1990, we confirm that it is a lack of household m...

We consider the effects of rent-seeking activities on resource allocation. Before rent-seeking activities take place, there are prior probabilities that an object will be given to one of several agents. The posterior probability depends on prior probabilities and the expenses incurred by all agents. In the case of two agents who equally value the object, prior and posterior probabilities coinci...

A central result in the theoretical literature on strategic trade is the ‘rent-shifting hypothesis’, the idea that government’s can employ trade policy as a precommitment device to transfer profit from foreign to domestic firms. To our knowledge, however, the rent-shifting hypothesis remains untested empirically. This paper constructs a theory-based empirical test of rent-shifting behavior that...

In this paper we present a model where agents can choose between 1 productive and rent-seeking activities.We consider two governance institutions: 2 autocracy and parliament rule. Under autocracy rent-seeking reflects the taste 3 of the autocrat for such activities. Under parliament rule rent-seeking depends 4 on parliament voting. We show that under parliament rule the size of rent5 seeking ma...

The establishment of a tradable permit market requires the regulator to select a level of aggregate emissions and then distribute the associated permits (rent) to speci…c groups. In most circumstances, these decisions are often politically contentious and frequently in‡uenced by rent seeking behaviour. In this paper, we use a contest model to analyse the e¤ects of rent seeking e¤ort when permit...

This study demarcates cost-inefficiency in Chinese banks into X-inefficiency and rent-seeking-inefficiency. A protected banking market not only encourages weak management and X-inefficiency but also public ownership and state directed lending encourages moral hazard and bureaucratic rent seeking. This paper uses bootstrap non-parametric techniques to estimate measures of X-inefficiency and rent...