How is corruption organized? Studies of corrupt behavior to date shed light on both the causes and consequences of corruption. Yet we have little understanding of how corrupt activities are structured and the ways in which rents are, or are not, distributed across various actors—insights that would, in theory, prove enlightening for efforts to reduce corruption. In this paper, I analyze the org...

Lucas and Rossi-Hansberg (2002) and Fujita and Ogawa (1982, 1989) develop urban models in which economic activity self-organizes due to spillovers in production. However, Fujita and Ogawa (1982, 1989) show that rents and employment density are flat or falling as the city center is approached, while in the simulations of Lucas and Rossi-Hansberg (2002) rents rise at an increasing rate towards th...

Many fisheries are potentially very valuable. According to a recent report by the World Bank and the FAO (2008), global fisheries rents could be as high as US$ 40-60 billion annually on a sustainable basis. However, according to the report, due to the “common property problem”, most fisheries of the world are severely overexploited and generate no economic rents. The Lake Victoria Nile perch fi...

The paper studies the influence of Gordon Tullock (1967) and the rent-seeking literature more generally on the study of corruption. The theoretical corruption literature with its emphasis on principal-agent relationships within government and rent creation by corruption politicians has largely, but not entirely, overlooked that contestable rents encourage unproductive use of real resources in s...

While in a few societies economic institutions are designed to provide property rights protection, a level playing field, and basic public goods necessary for economic growth, in many they are structured to maximize the rents captured by the “elite,” the individuals or social groups monopolizing political power (e.g., Douglass C. North 1981; Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson 2005. ...

Agents choose to acquire skills corresponding to simple and transparent tasks, or complex and opaque ones. While potentially more productive, the latter generate severe agency problems. In our overlapping generations model, agents compete with their predecessors. With dynamic contracts, long horizons help principals incentivize agents. Agents with short horizons are more diffi cult to incentivi...