Resource-based theory focuses on how economic value is created and sustained, providing the theoretical underpinnings for explaining and predicting sustainable competitive advantage. An implicit assumption of resource-based theory is that the firm’s property rights to such resources are secure. However, where property rights to potentially value-creating resources are not fully secure, as in bu...

Studies of real estate markets have long been hamstrung by the lack of reliable information on the flow price of housing. In contrast to the voluminous information on constant-quality real estate sale prices (from e.g. the Federal Housing Finance Administration) comparable indices for rents have not been available. The only widely available data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), ...

In democracies, elections are the primary mechanism for making politicians act in voters’ interests, but voters are unable to prevent that some resources are diverted to political rents. With two levels of government, the rents are reduced if voters require higher bene…cial public expenditures for reelecting incumbents. Voters can also strengthen their power by holding politicians also liable f...

This paper investigates complementarities between corruption and collusion in procurement of large divisible contracts. A first price multiple object auction procedure is administered by an agent who has some legal discretion to allow for a readjustment of (all) submitted offers before the official opening. The agent may be corrupt i.e. willing to ‘sell’ his decision in exchange for a bribe. Ou...

T he political influence Coefficient as a power of influence and political elite lobbying (the power rents) of each region in the decision-making and national budget allocations centers is a new word through which the present article, after introducing it, is able to rank the provinces in the tenth state using the multi-criteria decision-making models (MCDM). This issue is important ...

A central proposition of the transaction costs literature is that firms will substitute more complicated contractual arrangements for simple spot arrangements when transactions involve relationship-specific investments. I investigate this proposition by testing whether simple spot arrangements are less common when local trucking markets are thin. I find that doubling the thickness of the market...

This paper extends the optimal law enforcement literature to organized crime. We model the criminal organization as a vertical structure where the principal extracts some rents from the agents through extortion. Depending on the principal's information set, threats may or may not be credible. As long as threats are credible, the principal is able to fully extract rents. In that case, the result...

This paper investigates links between corruption and collusion in procurement. A …rst-price multiple-object auction is administered by an agent who has legal discretion to allow for a readjustment of (all) submitted o¤ers before the o¢ cial opening. The agent may be corrupt, i.e. willing to “sell”his decision in exchange for a bribe. Our main result shows that the corrupt agent’s incentives to ...

Rents tend to be relatively high in developing countries and also very fungible, so that differences in the scale of the rent and in its distribution among economic agents profoundly affect the nature of the political state and the development trajectory. This paper identifies two basic trajectories to a high-income democracy linked to the scale and deployment of rents. Low-rent countries tend ...

T he 1998 Purdue Land Values survey indicates that the value of an acre of average bare Indiana cropland was $2,155 per acre in June 1998, $55 more than the all-time peak reached in 1981. This is an increase of $158 per acre, or approximately 8 percent, over the value reported in 1997. In each of the past five years, annual increases in the value of this land have ranged from about $100 to over...