This study uses hearing transcripts to examine judge-defendant interaction in a trial-type setting. The setting is a public housing eviction hearing; judges are eviction board members and defendants are tenants facing eviction for non-payment of rent. All tenants in the sample were formally evicted, but in each case the execution of the eviction order was stayed on the condition that the tenant...

This paper develops and applies a method for producing constant quality rent indexes and inflation estimates for different segments of the rental housing stock. In each of the five contrasting metropolitan areas, rent inflation since the late 1980s is found to have varied by market segment. In some metro areas, rental prices have risen most rapidly in the bottom third of the rent distribution, ...

We investigate observed rent dissipation—the ratio of the total costs seeking to monetary value rent—in winner-take-all and share contests, where preferences are more general than usually assumed in literature. With concave valuation rent, we find that contests can exhibit over-dissipation if contested is below a threshold yet under-dissipation with large rents: nature implies contestants relat...

Why has the macroeconomic impact of foreign aid seemingly been so poor? Is there a relationship between the widespread level of corruption and other types of rent-seeking activities and concessional assistance? To answer these questions we provide a simple game-theoretic rent-seeking model. The model has a number of implications. First, under certain circumstances, an increase in government rev...