Reducing information rents is an important task for government agencies wishing to purchase maximal environmental services with limited budgets. This paper reports on several green auction options for reducing information rents and improving the performance of the "Grain for Green" Payments for environmental services (PES) program implemented in northwestern China. In r experimental auctions an...

This study investigates the impact of urban crime rates—property and violent—on wages rents estimates net implicit monetary value rates for living in metropolitan areas, using American Community Survey 2019 data cities North Carolina. A seemingly unrelated regression estimation finds that are capitalized into both rents, suggests affect positively negatively. investigation a negative $51.80 per...

This paper analyses the choice between a customs union (CU) and a free trade agreement (FTA) based on the dynamics of political influence induced by the two agreements. An FTA preserves the maximum future discretion a government might have over its trade policy in a trade agreement, but a CU commits the government to a particular external trade policy. For this reason, if government receives an...

The clean development mechanism (CDM) should foster sustainable development and greenhouse gas emission reductions. The design of the CDM and first experience suggest that it may not achieve these goals. Developing countries hosting CDM projects may lose cheap emission reduction possibilities for their own future use, and sustainable development and technology transfer may not take place. On th...

This paper analyzes the economic foundations of a one-party political regime, where the ruling bureaucracy captures rents through collective control over state property and job assignment. Stability of such a regime and the potential for endogenous institutional change are key issues in the transition to market economy and democracy in former socialist and many developing countries. Our model o...

Economists and sociologists disagree over markets’ potential to substitute for networks of private connections. In this paper we focus on the transmission of information in labor markets and study a model where workers differ in their (ex ante unobservable) productivity. Before entering the market, individuals can pay a cost and either establish a link to a currently employed worker ("network")...

In our paper on "Revenue Seeking: A Generalization of the Theory of Tariffs" (1980), we extended the theory of tariffs to include revenue seeking. We also compared tariffs with quotas, under seeking activities associated with the revenues from the former and with the rents (i.e., license premia) from the latter. We argued, among other propositions, that: (1) Revenue seeking was a zero-output ac...