Lucas and Rossi-Hansberg (2002) and Fujita and Ogawa (1982, 1989) develop urban models in which economic activity self-organizes due to spillovers in production. However, Fujita and Ogawa (1982, 1989) show that rents and employment density are flat or falling as the city center is approached, while in the simulations of Lucas and Rossi-Hansberg (2002) rents rise at an increasing rate towards th...

Many fisheries are potentially very valuable. According to a recent report by the World Bank and the FAO (2008), global fisheries rents could be as high as US$ 40-60 billion annually on a sustainable basis. However, according to the report, due to the “common property problem”, most fisheries of the world are severely overexploited and generate no economic rents. The Lake Victoria Nile perch fi...

The paper studies the influence of Gordon Tullock (1967) and the rent-seeking literature more generally on the study of corruption. The theoretical corruption literature with its emphasis on principal-agent relationships within government and rent creation by corruption politicians has largely, but not entirely, overlooked that contestable rents encourage unproductive use of real resources in s...

Agents choose to acquire skills corresponding to simple and transparent tasks, or complex and opaque ones. While potentially more productive, the latter generate severe agency problems. In our overlapping generations model, agents compete with their predecessors. With dynamic contracts, long horizons help principals incentivize agents. Agents with short horizons are more diffi cult to incentivi...

Resource-based theory focuses on how economic value is created and sustained, providing the theoretical underpinnings for explaining and predicting sustainable competitive advantage. An implicit assumption of resource-based theory is that the firm’s property rights to such resources are secure. However, where property rights to potentially value-creating resources are not fully secure, as in bu...

Studies of real estate markets have long been hamstrung by the lack of reliable information on the flow price of housing. In contrast to the voluminous information on constant-quality real estate sale prices (from e.g. the Federal Housing Finance Administration) comparable indices for rents have not been available. The only widely available data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), ...

A central proposition of the transaction costs literature is that firms will substitute more complicated contractual arrangements for simple spot arrangements when transactions involve relationship-specific investments. I investigate this proposition by testing whether simple spot arrangements are less common when local trucking markets are thin. I find that doubling the thickness of the market...

This paper extends the optimal law enforcement literature to organized crime. We model the criminal organization as a vertical structure where the principal extracts some rents from the agents through extortion. Depending on the principal's information set, threats may or may not be credible. As long as threats are credible, the principal is able to fully extract rents. In that case, the result...