We consider a rent control regime where rent increases on, and eviction of, a sitting tenant are not allowed. However when an apartment becomes vacant the landlord is free to negotiate a new rent. We argue that this stylized system is a good (though polar) approximation for many rent control regimes existent today in several U.S. cities and the world over. Under such a regime, if inflation exis...

This paper discusses the optimal firm size in the presence of internal rent seeking. Since firm size has a discouragement effect on the level of individual rent-seeking but also a quantity effect as the number of rent-seekers increases, the interplay of both effects — together with technological considerations — determines whether the employer chooses an inefficiently small or large firm size. ...

This paper considers the effects of rent control on community socioeconomic composition. In particular, do rent controls increase the presence of poor and minority residents in a locale? Theoretically, the effect of rent controls on community composition depends on a tradeoff between lower prices which might favor the disadvantaged and a landlord imposed rationing mechanism which likely does no...

Developing technological applications, entering exploitation alliances, and choosing between a researchor service-focused strategic orientation are decisions that high-tech firms must manage concurrently. This paper explores systematically the contrasting effects of these strategic determinants on rent-generation and rent-appropriation using the entire population of French biotech firms (1994-2...

Neoclassical economists argue that competition promotes efficiency. They consider technology as given though. In the long run technological progress is an important determinant of the level of welfare and Schumpeter argued that monopoly rents help entrepreneurs to capture the gains of R&D and hence to invest in it. We investigate the overall effect of competition on performance. Performance is ...

This paper conceptualises foreign aid as a geopolitical form of rent in order to help distinguish the conditions under which aid is detrimental to sustained economic recovery from those where it is beneficial. Foreign aid shares with natural resource rent and contrived (i.e., government monopoly) rent the property of being a large revenue stream that is detached from the economic activity that ...

Over the past century, the tuna canning industry has been dominated by a few big companies, some of them having changed of ownership or merged: these oligopolistic firms are the “big three” in the USA, Van Camp, Star Kist, and Bumble Bee, the French Saupiquet, the Italian Trinity Alimentari and the Spanish Calvo in Europe, and, a bit later, the Thailandese groups Thai Union and Sea Value. Speci...