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...

• Our model predicts that house prices rise more than rents with Airbnb presence. presence in a borough increases and, to lesser extent, rents. Results suggest tourist renting may offset increased housing costs for owners.

Old elites can block changes, but not all do. Why is it that stronger elites may allow more changes than weaker elites? Why do economies with larger stocks of natural resources not grow faster than economies poorer in natural resources? We argue that old elites hold some power to extract rents from the economy. Whereas old sectors (i.e. agriculture or extraction of natural resources) are not af...

Resource-rich countries have tended to be autocratic and also have tended to use their resource wealth badly. The neoconservative agenda of promoting democratization in resource-rich countries thus offers the hopeful prospect of a better use of their economic opportunities. This paper examines whether the effect of democracy on economic performance is distinctive in resource-rich societies. We ...

The absence of a competitive market may enable public-sector workers to extract rents from taxpayers in the form of high pay, especially when public-sector workers are unionized. On the other hand, this rent extraction may be suppressed by the ability of taxpayers to vote with their feet, leaving jurisdictions where public-sector workers extract high rents. However, although migration of taxpay...

The aim of the paper is to determine how profiles of annual extraction volumes would have differed under alternative policy objectives, conditional on optimizing behaviour and perfect knowledge about assumed future demand and supply functions, and the extent of the phosphate reserves. Three dynamic optimisation problems are formulated and solved for the following three objective functions, with...