We propose a model where investors may choose to acquire costly information that identifies good assets and purchase these assets in opaque (OTC) markets. Uninformed investors access an asset pool that has been cream-skimmed by informed investors. When the quality composition of assets for sale is fixed there is too much information acquisition and the financial industry extracts excessive rent...

This paper examines land tenancy systems and tenant contracts in Rwanda, with respect to socioeconomic contexts. Our research in southern and eastern Rwanda produced data suggesting that land borrowing with fixed rents has been generally practiced, and that rent levels have been low in comparison to expected revenues from field production. In the western areas of coffee production, however, the...

As the experience of Russia and some Eastern European countries has demonstrated, economic reform is difficult to carry out when the rank-and-file officials or bureaucrats to whom authorities must turn to implement change resist the reforms in order to protect their vested interests. Drawing on an unusual longitudinal survey data set for a representative rural county in northern China, we show ...

Economic reform is difficult to carry out because it often undercuts the status and economic advantage of the rank-and-file officials to whom authorities must turn to implement market-based changes. Drawing on new longitudinal data collected between 1991 and 1994 in a representative rural county in Northern China, we demonstrate that local officials have not in fact lost out. To the contrary, t...

This paper proposes a theory of the impact of product-market competition on managerial decision-making autonomy based on managers’ concern about keeping their incumbency rents (that competition puts at risk), and on the idea that changes in market conditions a¤ect the congruence between the interests of the di¤erent hierarchical levels. The main focus of my analysis is on how changes in market ...

A long-running debate in labour economics concerns the interpretation of industry and occupational wage differentials. One view is that these reflect compensating differentials for mostly unmeasured aspects of jobs: utilities are equalised between industries and occupations, but wages are not. Alternatively, there may be labour market rents: identical workers in some industries and occupations ...

Fair Trade (FT) markets have been introduced as a mechanism to improve the economic livelihoods of smallholder farmers by translating consumers’ “ethical demand” into higher prices for producers. Unlike other certification mechanisms such as organic, dolphin-friendly, and shade grown that intend on affecting the production process, FT explicitly seeks to deliver rents to producers via the price...

We analyze a game where one agent (the “leader”) decides first how much free information he collects, and then how much of this information he transmits to another agent (the “decisionmaker”). Conditional on the information disclosed, the decision-maker undertakes an action that affects the payoff of both agents. We assume a conflict of preferences between the two agents and rely on previous re...

This paper answers two questions: "What impact have natural resources had on the spread of the HIV epidemic so far?" and "What role can natural resource rents play in order to finance the long-run response to HIV/AIDS?" Using a panel dataset covering 137 countries from 1990 until 2008, de Soysa and Gizelis (2013) provided evidence in Social Science & Medicine that oil-rich countries are more de...

The physical nature of electricity generation and delivery creates special problems for the design of efficient markets, notably the need to manage delivery in real time and the volatile congestion and associated costs that result. Proposals for the operation of the deregulated electricity industry tend towards one of two paradigms: centralized and decentralized. Transmission congestion managem...