Diversity is often thought to create conflict and harm economic institutions. We hypothesize, however, that the impact of diversity is conditional on political institutions, and may be negative in some settings but positive in others, due to differences in the nature of rent seeking in different regimes. To test this hypothesis, we estimate the impact of diversity on economic freedom, condition...

This paper extends a new line of research on urban squatting that focuses on the role of the squatter organizer. The model replaces the benevolent organizer from previous studies with a collection of competing, rent-seeking squatter organizers, a structure that may offer a realistic picture of many cities in less-developed countries. In addition to delineating the structure of such a competitiv...

A model of rent-seeking group contest is developed. The contested good is a local public good. Individuals have private information concerning their valuation for the contested good. I restrict effort levels to be dichotomous, allowing me in turn tractability of the equilibria. I show existence of an equilibrium. All contestants exert positive expected effort in equilibrium. From simulation res...

We consider rent-seeking contests with two players that each have private information about their own cost of effort. We consider both discrete and continuous distributions of costs and give results for each case, focusing on existence of equilibria. JEL Classification: D72; C72

This article shows that how we look at political rent and rent-seeking depends on our position state interference in the economy which theory of regulation are familiar with. Although is accordance with paradigm private interest (economic) theories regulation, researcher also needs an insight based public if he wants to judge impact creation social well-being properly. The paper a conceptualiza...

In a reciprocal market model with imperfectly competitive firms, domestic policies will differ across countries that are economically and politically diverse. We explore the implications of this standard result with regard to harmonization of environmental policies between corrupt and non-corrupt countries. Imposing a more stringent policy on a non-corrupt government will be welfare reducing to...

In this paper, a group contest is analyzed, where the groups are allowed to determine their sharing rules either sequentially or simultaneously. It is found that in case the more numerous group determines its sharing rule prior to the smaller group, rent dissipation in the group contest is higher than in an individual contest. However, if the order of moves is endogenized, the smaller group wil...

We introduce bids in a rent-seeking contest. Players compete for a prize. Apart from exerting lobbying efforts, they also submit a bid which is payable only if they win the prize. We show that our model has a unique Nash equilibrium in pure strategies, in which each active player submits the same bid, while the sum of all efforts equals that bid. In equilibrium there is underdissipation of rent.

If government offers a prize to firms, each may likely lobby to be the beneficiary. The heavy lobbying may signal to government that the prize is too large, inducing government to cancel the policy. ∗Professor of Economics, University of California–Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697. E-mail: [email protected]. Telephone: 949-824-5974.